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 Part 19 in an ongoing series looking at players who only appeared on certain teams in video games.
In Part 18 last month, I covered a couple of well-known players who only appeared on certain teams in video games, including an example from last season. For Part 19, I’m going back a bit further, with the most recent phantom stint occurring during the 2015 campaign. The older examples are also more obscure names that even hardcore NBA fans likely haven’t thought about in years. I do enjoy discussing those players though, as I’m sure that I’m not the only one that gets a nostalgic kick out of seeing or hearing the name of a long-forgotten journeyman that was once a mainstay in the league!
The fifth example – the one from the 2015 season – is the only player to have enjoyed a lengthy NBA career, which included an All-Star appearance and a couple of other honours. It’s obviously a good idea to include at least one player that we’ve all heard of and remember, but I’m also pleased with that example because it’s another one that I encountered by chance! As I’ve said before, David L has been extremely helpful in pointing out many players that needed to be covered in this series, but it’s always fun when serendipity delivers another name to me. With that being said, let’s get to the next group of five players whose phantom stints have been preserved in video games!
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 Part 17 in an ongoing series looking at players who only appeared on certain teams in video games.
Many of the examples of players who only appeared on certain teams in games go back a number of years. There’s a reason for that, and it’s not just my love of retro basketball gaming (though yes, that is a factor!). With decades of basketball video games capturing a snapshot of the NBA when they were released, there have been tons of older examples to cover. On top of that, official roster updates were once uncommon, preserving a number of phantom stints. With active players who are potential examples, I obviously need to wait until their phantom stints are “official”.
However, there are indeed players who only appeared on certain teams in more recent video games too, and are safe examples to cover at this point. To that end, in Part 17 of this ongoing series, there are three players whose phantom stints are preserved in games that were released within the last five years. With that being said, the first two examples are much older, including one that I’ve somehow neglected to mention in this series until now, despite noting it in other features. Once again, I must shout out David L, as his research has been invaluable in compiling examples for this second run of articles about players who only appeared on certain teams in video games!
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 original All-Time Teams that were featured in early NBA 2K titles.
The concept of All-Time Teams is naturally a staple of sports discussion. Which franchise could field the best lineup with all the players that have ever worn their uniform? Who can boast the best all-time starting lineup? Who would prevail in a showdown of stars, if they could all be together on the team in their prime? Such What Ifs are impossible to conclusively prove in reality, but they’re a great idea for fantasy matchups in video games. Even in the early days of NBA Live modding, the community was creating Legends and All-Time Teams rosters.
Those projects have remained popular over the years, so it’s no surprise that with all of the other historical content in NBA 2K, All-Time squads were eventually added for each franchise. As I noted when I covered those teams in a previous article, while the concept was nothing new, it saved us a lot of time by ensuring that certain players and assets would be in the game by default. However, I neglected to mention that NBA 2K18 wasn’t the first game in the series to feature All-Time Teams, as a few such squads were unlockable in earlier releases. Let’s take a look back…way back…
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 player stints that never officially appeared in any basketball video games.
One of the reasons that I enjoy retro basketball gaming, and covering old titles for Wayback Wednesday, is the interactive almanac aspect. As I’ve said so many times, firing up old games is like consulting an almanac or encyclopedia. You’ll see all the familiar faces in strange places, and back in familiar places. The memorable teams of yesteryear are there to browse, and of course, play with. For so many of us, video games complemented our NBA fandom, and were part of following along with the league that year. Not to overuse a phrase, but they capture a snapshot of the season.
Well…for the most part! As I’ve demonstrated through various articles, there are aspects of basketball video games that prevent them from being completely accurate interactive almanacs. We’ve seen phantom stints; the players that only appeared on certain teams in games, as they didn’t ever suit up for that club in an official NBA contest. There are comebacks that were over before they began, and players who made it into the rosters of video games without ever tallying a single minute in the league. And then, there are the players who had stints that never appeared in the official rosters of a game. Here are five of the most memorable unaccounted for stints.
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #483 of the NLSC Podcast!
We’re taking a look back at Sony’s NBA 07 for PlayStation 3 this week, after successfully connecting to play a H2H game using PS Rewired. Although it was a bit of an oddball title in many ways, it had some strong points that highlight the importance of having alternatives to NBA 2K and NBA Live. Our experience with PS Rewired also prompts us to reflect on the different ways that we’re able to connect to play basketball video games these days. We also touch on the recent Twitter debate between members of Sim Nation and the Left-Right Cheesers; you can probably guess whose side we’re on! Meanwhile, in honour of a crazy alley-oop from our NBA 07 session, this week’s mailbag is all about bad mechanics.
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 56:23 — 39.1MB)
To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #479 of the NLSC Podcast!
With some big stories and events in the NBA right now, our attention turns to real hoops this week! From the Denver Nuggets making their very first NBA Finals, to Carmelo Anthony announcing his retirement, to the latest sad and bitter tirade from Scottie Pippen, we’ve got some thoughts to share. Speaking of real basketball, we also join the community in talking about the pre-game rituals and inspirational material that gets us pumped up to play pick-up and league games. As for the virtual hardwood, we discuss a false narrative regarding the style of NBA Live and NBA 2K during the 2000s, and shout out some excellent content creators in the community. In this week’s mailbag, we’re taking a look back at the Overall Ratings of the top seven active players in ESPN NBA 2K5.
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:06:18 — 45.9MB)
To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!
Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee4Three! New and old games alike are featured in this celebration of spectacular moments on the virtual hardwood. To submit your clips, post them in this topic, or hit up Dee on Twitter.
I don’t envy the task of choosing just ten plays and then ranking them to boot, because the community keeps taking things to a new level with their submissions! Dee has an eye for highlights and a talent for video production though, and with basketball gamers bringing the goods once again, the NLSC Top 10 Plays is the best three minutes of virtual hardwood action you’ll find this week. And no, I’m not just saying that because I’m in there with a play from my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER! Prepare to be enthralled by ankle breakers, alley-oops, and clutch plays from seven different games…and also be ready to pick up a controller soon afterwards. Let’s get to the action!
What was your favourite highlight this week? Sound off in the comments below, and once again, get in on the fun by sending us your best plays! Remember, as long as it’s a basketball game, it’s eligible for the countdown. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube for more basketball gaming videos.
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 Part 8 in an ongoing series looking at players that only appeared on certain teams in video games.
Just when I thought I’d finished this series with Part 7 last year, I was presented with a bunch of names making it clear that some further articles were in order! Shout out to David L for his memory and research on the topic, as he provided a vast majority of the examples that I’ll be discussing in the articles to come. There are some significant names and other well-known players that I overlooked in the previous instalments, and once they were pointed out, I knew I’d have to follow up on them. Other players aren’t as famous, but hardcore basketball fans and gamers will no doubt recall them.
As I’ve said before, players end up only appearing on certain teams in games for very familiar reasons. Before official updates were common, the default rosters remained a snapshot of some point during the offseason. If a player ended up being cut or traded after the roster cut-off date, the game would preserve a stint that never came to be in real life. Similarly, a player might have remained on a team’s roster beyond the game’s launch, but still didn’t ever play for them before they parted ways. And of course, official roster updates also sometimes reflect these stints. Whatever the case may be, they’ve left us with some interesting NBA and roster trivia in a variety of games.
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 lists five features that didn’t originate in NBA Live or NBA 2K.
From the mid 90s through to today, NBA Live and NBA 2K are the two biggest names as far as sim basketball games are concerned. Obviously NBA Jam and NBA Street were the top dogs in the arcade space, and there have been other series of sim titles that have produced quality releases. However, when we’re talking about the brand leader in NBA licensed sim titles, it’s been NBA Live and NBA 2K for more than a quarter of a century, with the latter taking the crown from the former during the 2000s. Of course, it hasn’t been a competition for quite some time.
Nevertheless, being the two biggest names/brand leaders in sim basketball games has meant that many of the innovations in the genre did originate with either NBA Live or NBA 2K. To that end, they’ve ended up borrowing ideas from each other, which as I’ve long maintained is actually a good thing when it comes to features that should be staples of a sim game. Of course, there are also some great features that we take for granted that didn’t originate in NBA Live or NBA 2K. Some of them are older than we think, appearing in one of their predecessors, while other times it was one of their contemporaries that beat them to the punch. Either way, another game did it first.
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 history of Shaq and his Superman logo tattoo in basketball video games.
Not only is Shaquille O’Neal one of the greatest players in the history of basketball, but he’s one of the most prominent faces in basketball video games. By virtue of a 19-year NBA career and the inclusion of historical content, Shaq has appeared in at least one video game every year going back to 1993; a streak that rivals his “teammates in the NBA Finals” record! Of course, when it comes to depicting the Diesel in video games, accuracy demands that he’s sporting his ink. On that note, as you’re probably aware, Shaq has a prominent tattoo of the Superman logo on his left arm.
As the detail on player models improved, virtual Shaq likewise began sporting his Superman tattoo; or did he? As RayRay_953 pointed out in the Forum, there’s an interesting history with Shaq’s ink and its appearance in basketball video games over the years. Certain games have achieved a degree of accuracy with the tattoo, while others have taken some creative liberties with the design. I’ve scoured the games in my collection to bring you an overview of how different titles depicted Shaq with his Superman tattoo throughout the years. Let’s take a look back…way back…
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 Part 6 in an ongoing series listing players that appeared in more video games than actual NBA games.
When it comes to trivia like this, I’m always concerned about running the topic into the ground. I always want my features to be fresh and interesting, and going back to a particular subject does invite repetition, while potentially appearing to be lacking in imagination. At the same time, I want to be thorough, covering all of the relevant and interesting examples. It’s why I’ve repurposed some topics that I originally planned as Friday Five series into longer lists for Wayback Wednesday. Since this one goes back a few years and has five instalments already, I figured I’d keep the ball rolling.
Meta musings about my “process” aside, I do have another five examples of players who appeared in more video games than NBA games. It’s not an unprecedented phenomenon – obviously, since we’re up to Part 6 – but it’s still somewhat unusual. You’d expect there to be more examples of players who made the NBA yet were left out of games, but that’s become rarer thanks to official roster updates. Alternatively, you might expect players who fall just short of officially debuting in the NBA to be absent from video games entirely. When the timing is right though, those players get to play on the virtual hardwood, while having some interesting stories in real life.
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #436 of the NLSC Podcast!
Revisiting Fox Sports NBA Basketball 2000 reminded us of how hilariously bad it is, but it also found a new way to mess with us. Not surprisingly, NBA Live 2004 holds up much better, especially with a broadcast camera mod and the 1996 season roster. We received a couple of responses to last week’s show asking about acquiring copies of NBA Live PC and other older releases, so this week, we dive into how to get into retro basketball gaming/collecting. It needn’t be expensive, nor do you need to be the crazy collectors that we are! In this week’s mailbag, we circle back to the question of what counts as retro in basketball gaming, with our listeners sharing some interesting and differing opinions on the matter.
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:17:27 — 53.5MB)
To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!
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 Part 4 in an ongoing series where I look at players who only appeared on certain teams in video games.
It’s time for some more video game roster trivia! As I’m so fond of saying, old NBA video games are like interactive almanacs, capturing snapshots of the league at the time of their release (or indeed, their most recent roster update). Revisiting those titles reminds us of players who became familiar faces in strange places, as well as those who later returned to familiar places. We can see comebacks that were over before they began, as well as odd situations such as Michael Redd’s appearance on the Dallas Mavericks in NBA Live 2003 PC.
Those are the stints I’m taking about again today: the players that only appeared on certain teams in video games. There are several reasons why this happens, from an offseason acquisition that was cut in between the rosters being finalised and the real season tipping off, to injuries resulting in a stint that only occurs on paper and the virtual hardwood. Unless you have an encyclopaedic knowledge of trades and free agent signings over the years, it may not be until you dust off an old game that you remember a player only technically appearing on a roster. Of course, you may not be a crazy collector of old games like I am, so allow me to provide some more examples!
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #435 of the NLSC Podcast!
Barring a very surprising announcement, NBA Live won’t be back in 2022. However, EA Sports has a golden opportunity to make a triumphant return with NBA Live 24 in 2023. The question is, how do they sell it to basketball gamers, and meet their expectations? We posed the question to the community, and received many enthusiastic answers as to what would encourage gamers to switch back to NBA Live, or double dip with NBA Live and NBA 2K. An old story about Julius Erving and the Utah Jazz also prompts us to consider interesting scenarios for a “What If” roster mod, and we recap a fun co-op session of NBA Inside Drive 2003 over Parsec.
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:54:40 — 79.1MB)
To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!
From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #430 of the NLSC Podcast!
During a session of NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, we made the exciting discovery that the servers appear to be reactivated! We’re hoping it isn’t temporary, and note a few other games we’d like to see receive online support again. A vague Tweet from EA has invited those of us hoping for NBA Live’s return to speculate once more. This leads us to discuss our concerns about influencers giving a new NBA Live game a fair chance, if and when it comes out. A clip from the archives prompts us to reflect on The Jordan Challenge in NBA 2K11, and the attention to detail that was paid to Michael Jordan’s return to video games. We also answer a question about whether games have become too realistic, and open up the mailbag to talk about our favourite highlights, real and virtual.
Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:27:30 — 60.5MB)
To get involved with the mailbag or to provide any feedback on the show, hit us up in the comments, reach out on social media, or post here in the NLSC Forum! For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. You can also find the show on our YouTube channel, along with the rest of our video content. As always, thanks for tuning in, and go get buckets!
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