Tag Archives: Dream Team

We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on how bonus content is much better than live service content.

Live service content is an inescapable part of so many Triple-A games these days. While the idea didn’t exactly begin with mobile gaming – expansion packs and the like have been available for decades – modern Triple-A titles definitely take their cues from games with freemium economies. The concept succeeds because there is merit to it. Live service content can keep games fresh for as long as they’re supported, giving us something to look forward to. Of course, it can also be predatory, not to mention a crutch for games that are incomplete at launch.

To that end, in my opinion, bonus content that’s in the game from the very beginning is much better than live service content. I realise what an “old head” opinion that must sound like, but I stand by it. There’s a joy to bonus content that I just don’t believe live service content can replicate, because of its underlying concept and aims. It’s not that I haven’t ever enjoyed the live service content in recent basketball games, or for that matter, been underwhelmed by the bonus content found in old ones. However, as I’ve revisited more and more old games for Wayback Wednesday and explored their bonus content, the more soulless and dull that live service content has become in my eyes.

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It’s always satisfying when the community can track down long-lost files, and that’s what’s happened with today’s NBA Live 2000 mod releases! SSJYOUNGJ21 was able to locate Air Assault’s old Dream Teams roster for NBA Live 2000 PC, which includes four iterations of Team USA, as well as squads of Slam Dunk and Three-Point Shootout champions. Check it out at the link below!

Air Assault
Dream Teams Roster

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

In case this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays wasn’t enough exciting virtual hardwood action for you, Dee and I have uploaded another couple of videos! Dee has posted footage of a full game in NBA Superstars, while I’ve uploaded an NBA 2K6 Xbox 360 highlight reel featuring the 1992 Dream Team.

For those who are unaware, NBA Superstars is a new arcade basketball video game by Play Mechanix. It’s inspired by NBA Jam, right down to featuring the legendary Tim Kitzrow on commentary. Dee found the game at a local arcade, and took on the Los Angeles Clippers with his Boston Celtics. We’ll be talking about it on the next episode of the NLSC Podcast, so stay tuned!

Since I began my retro kick with NBA 2K6 for Xbox 360, I’ve been tinkering with some minimalist roster projects. I have a work-in-progress roster featuring 20 new Legends – that’s as many as you can create in the game – and that facilitated a re-creation of the 1992 Dream Team’s famous scrimmage. It’s another example of how minimalist modding can still set up fun new scenarios in a variety of basketball video games.

Check out our NBA Superstars and NBA 2K6 videos below! As always, be sure to subscribe to the NLSC YouTube channel if you haven’t already, and feel free to hit us up with any suggestions of games that you’d like to see us play.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at the Dream Team in NBA 2K17.

They’ve often been cited as the greatest basketball team ever assembled. They swept their way to the gold at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games, famously winning by an average of 44 points per game while never calling timeout. Eleven of its players are enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame for their individual accomplishments, and the team itself was collectively inducted in 2009. Eight years later, the team would also be inducted into the FIBA Hall of Fame. Simply put, the Dream Team was a squad for the ages.

As far as the virtual hardwood is concerned, the Dream Team has made a handful of official appearances in video games. They were the cover stars of EA Sports’ Team USA Basketball, and were included in NBA 2K13; appearances that I’ve previously covered here in Wayback Wednesday. The most recent game to officially feature the Dream Team was NBA 2K17, an appearance that stands out as somewhat different – and indeed slightly controversial – compared to previous releases. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five frustrations that sadly didn’t have a good workaround.

We’ve been able to do some rather ingenious things in our community thanks to mods. Missing players have been added, mistakes in the default rosters have been corrected, and when we’ve discovered compatible files, we’ve been able to swap assets between different games to create our own fixes. This includes adding better net animations to NBA Live 06 PC, restoring access to the traditional reorder roster menu in NBA Live 07’s Dynasty mode, and even being able to access the hidden Player Lock option in NBA Live 08. Where official updates have fallen short, we’ve had good workarounds.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t always been possible. There are some frustrations that we simply haven’t ever been able to resolve. Even when a workaround has been devised, it hasn’t satisfactorily fixed the issue despite our best efforts. This is why I’ll always push back on the “stop whining” rhetoric that shuts down constructive feedback. Just because there is a workaround, it doesn’t mean it’s a desirable solution, and that the issue shouldn’t be addressed either in a patch or the next game. Additionally, one of these frustrations did once have a good workaround, but its disappearance suggests that it wasn’t ideal long-term. Whatever the case, these issues lack good solutions.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at NBA 2K13.

As a 90s kid who grew up with NBA Live, that series has been the focus of several of my retrospectives. In addition to Wayback Wednesday features, I’ve also covered every NBA Live as part of our 25th Anniversary celebrations. I haven’t celebrated NBA 2K’s milestones in the same way, mostly because while I do consider myself a fan of the series now, I don’t have the same nostalgia for and experience with it going right back to the beginning of my basketball gaming. Games like NBA 2K14 and even NBA 2K11 have only become some of my all-time favourites in retrospect.

However, there are NBA 2K titles that I’ve played enthusiastically from launch, and am nostalgic for. Indeed, this year marks the tenth anniversary of the first 2K title that I was hooked on from day one: NBA 2K13. While the cancellation of NBA Live 13 was another blow for EA Sports, it opened up an opportunity for me to expand my basketball gaming horizons, and Visual Concepts didn’t disappoint. Even putting aside my personal affinity for NBA 2K13, I believe it’s one of the strongest releases in the NBA 2K series. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at some of the updates that have become long-lost, and the quest to track them down.

With the internet’s ability to connect the world and make information and content readily accessible, there’s a particular interest in using it for preservation. It’s why there’s debate over dumping ROMs of games, particularly those that were never released and could otherwise easily become lost media. We’ve felt the sting of lost content in our modding community. So many great mods from the early days are long-lost now, and even more recent releases have disappeared because they were uploaded to file hosts that won’t guarantee availability in perpetuity.

And then, there are the long-lost official updates for various games. We actually have some old official patches in our Downloads section, as well as official roster updates, but it’s not a complete archive. Files that can be downloaded disappear from personal archives as well as the web, and in-game content updates likewise vanish and become long-lost when servers are shut down. This leaves us on a quest to find those long-lost updates, but all too often, it’s unfortunately been a fruitless search. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at some basketball gaming urban legends.

Given the amount of secret content that’s been packed into video games over the years, it’s no surprise that there are more than a couple of urban legends across all genres. TV Tropes creatively titles the phenomenon “Urban Legend of Zelda“, which is extremely apt considering how many examples the Legend of Zelda series itself provides. Basketball games have had their fair share of urban legends, perpetuated through a combination of schoolyard (and later, internet) chatter, misunderstandings, and the occasional trolling hoax.

There have been some interesting urban legends associated with the virtual hardwood, concerning both sim and arcade games. In some cases, you can see how gamers came to believe them, especially before the ins and outs of player likenesses were widely known. I’m sure you’ve heard some of these before, but it never hurts to debunk urban legends, and tell the real story if there is one. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to another edition of The Friday Five! Every Friday I cover a topic related to basketball gaming, either as a list of five items, or a Top 5 countdown. The topics for these lists and countdowns include everything from fun facts and recollections to commentary and critique. This week’s Five is a list of five things – namely saves or other data and content – that I carelessly lost in various games.

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone. It’s an old adage that’s been lamented in the music of Joni Mitchell and the band Cinderella alike. The sentiment usually refers to more important things in life than video games, but since that’s what we cover around these parts, I’ll appropriate it for this occasion. After all, while I think we can and should acknowledge that other losses are far more significant in the grand scheme of things, it’s still a bummer when we lose save files, data, and other content in video games. Life goes on, but it sucks to have all that progress go up in smoke.

It’s bad enough when it occurs due to a glitch in a game, but at least you can turn your anger and frustration outwards towards the developers and publisher. When you’ve carelessly done something that’s resulted in your progress being lost, it’s tougher to shift the blame onto somebody else! Even if there’s something clunky in the game that’s partly to blame, you’re stuck with the knowledge that it could’ve been avoided if you were just the teeniest bit more careful. The times when I’ve been careless with my save files are undoubtedly among my biggest regrets as far as basketball gaming is concerned. Here are five things that I’ve lost due to a lack of care and foresight.

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at the role Jay-Z played as an executive producer on NBA 2K13.

Back in December, I wrote an article about Jay-Z’s forgotten cameo in NBA Live 07. I received some nice compliments from people who enjoyed learning about that for the first time, as well as some suggestions to look back at Jay-Z’s involvement as an executive producer on NBA 2K13. That topic was actually already on my list of ideas for Wayback Wednesday features, but since it’s been requested, I figure there’s no point delaying it any further. After all, it’s even better if I can cover these topics when there’s interest, and to that end, I’m open to suggestions!

For now though, let’s focus on Jay-Z and his role with NBA 2K13. Obviously, the rapper wasn’t actually spending hours coding at Visual Concepts’ studio in Novato, but as it turned out, he had a significant impact on the game. His title also briefly inspired a trend in our modding community. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at Scottie Pippen and his legacy in basketball video games.

Chicago Bulls legend and Hall of Famer Scottie Pippen turns 54 today. Incidentally, September 25th is a birthday that he shares with Mark Hamill, Will Smith, and my friend Courtney (Happy 30th Birthday, Courtney!). As you may know, my all-time favourite player is Michael Jordan, but Scottie Pippen is a close second, being MJ’s teammate on six Bulls championship squads in the 90s. I have many fond memories of that dynamic duo – dubbed “The Dobermans” by Johnny Bach due to their tenacity at both ends of the court – which could fill several Wayback Wednesday articles.

However, we obviously focus on basketball video games here at the NLSC. To that end, as it’s Pip’s birthday and he’s one of my all-time favourite players – as well as one of the greatest players in the history of basketball – it seems only appropriate that I take a look back at his legacy on the virtual hardwood. In my opinion, he has a rather interesting history in that regard, given how basketball video games were developed during his prime, and considering his standing among the NBA greats. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at the Dream Team in NBA 2K13.

There have been several interesting (and heated) debates on the subject over the years, but for my money, the greatest squad of basketball players ever assembled was the 1992 United States men’s Olympic team, better known as the Dream Team. Featuring some of the greatest players to ever play the sport, the Dream Team breezed through the tournament, putting on a show as they won each game convincingly, never once calling a timeout. Their scrimmages are the stuff of legend, and it’s no surprise that they were enshrined into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame as a team in 2010.

With 2012 marking the 20th Anniversary of the Dream Team’s dominant showing in Barcelona, and Visual Concepts looking to expand the amount of historical content in NBA 2K13, adding the Dream Team was a no-brainer. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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2K has released another new NBA 2K17 screenshot today, featuring Team 2K member Andre Drummond. Check it out below, as well as over in our screenshots gallery. If a couple more screenshots are heading our way in the near future, it seems a safe bet that they’ll feature the remaining members of Team 2K, Kevin Durant and Draymond Green.

IGN has also posted a preview of NBA 2K17, discussing the developers’ aim to improve authenticity in this year’s title. In additional to visual enhancements, it provides us with a few tidbits on gameplay. This year, we’ll reportedly have more control over the action, with less reliance on probability from stats. Fatigue has also been revamped to have a larger effect on player performance, while rebounding will involve more physicality and tipped balls.

The IGN preview also notes that due to the changes in the way Euroleague teams are selected, this year’s teams are all up to date, rather than being a year behind with their rosters. On top of that, we have confirmation that the 1992 Dream Team will be available as paid DLC, in addition to being a pre-order bonus. While that still may not sit well with a lot of basketball gamers, it is good news for anyone who plans on picking up the game later, and doesn’t mind shelling out a few bucks for the Dream Team. No word as yet on how much that DLC will cost.

Finally, a few gameplay videos have been coming out of Gamescom, which a couple of our members have been diligently sourcing and posting in the Forum. You can check them out below; thanks to Manni Live and PeacemanNOT for the heads up!

What are your thoughts on the latest developments with NBA 2K17? Have your say below in the comments, and join in the discussion taking place here in the NLSC Forum!

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The first official teaser trailer for NBA 2K17 has finally been released. Titled “The Dream Lives On”, it spotlights Team USA 2016, as well as the pre-order exclusive 1992 Dream Team. The Star Spangled Banner accompanies clips of both teams during pre-game introductions and prior to tip-off, along with a few cinematic gameplay clips and celebration animations.

Notably, while Mike Krzyzewski is featured in the trailer, the late Chuck Daly is not shown on the sidelines for the Dream Team. Daly was also absent from the first official screenshots that were released whereas Coach K was included along with Team USA 2016. That would seem to confirm that Daly will not appear in NBA 2K17. Aside from that, all twelve members of the original Dream Team are accounted for.

The Australian Boomers will also be joining Team USA and the original Dream Team in NBA 2K17, along with other international squads that are yet to be announced. Check out the trailer below, or watch it here on YouTube if you can’t see the embedded video.

What are your thoughts on the teaser trailer? Will you be pre-ordering NBA 2K17 to play with the 1992 Dream Team? Have your say in the comments below, and join in the discussion here in the NLSC Forum.

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content.

Whenever I’m deciding on what I want to talk about for Wayback Wednesday, it’s generally either a game I’ve been meaning to review or discuss for some time, or a topic that’s somehow related to the date or a current event. With the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro underway, and Team USA seeking another gold medal in basketball, it seems like as good a time as any to talk about Team USA Basketball for the SEGA Genesis.

For those who have never heard of it, Team USA Basketball is actually a spinoff of the NBA Playoffs series – EA’s forerunner to NBA Live – and was the first game to feature the legendary Dream Team, long before NBA 2K13. Released exclusively for the SEGA Genesis in 1992, it’s obviously very primitive compared to its successors, but what was it like, and how does it hold up today? I offer up my thoughts on this arguably lesser known EA basketball game, in a new video retrospective.

Let’s take a look back…way back…

Check it out here on our YouTube channel if you can’t see the embedded video. As I’ve said before, while I can’t always find the time to work on them, I do enjoy making video retrospectives, so hopefully you enjoyed watching it as well! Be sure to check in each and every Wednesday for more videos, articles, and other retro basketball video gaming content!