Tag Archives: Fatigue

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 that you’ll see in games that are unpatched.

Patches are a contentious issue among gamers, and basketball video games are no exception. No game is perfect, and some issues are bound to slip by QA and won’t be discovered until a game is in the public’s hands. Naturally, we want to see those problems resolved via official patches, especially when there’s no viable unofficial fix. At the same time, we’re wary of undesirable changes being made to games that we’re enjoying, as we have seen games ruined by their updates. Day one patches are also the subject of scorn, being seen as an excuse to release unfinished games.

As such, many of us have mixed feelings whenever we receive a notification that a new update is waiting to be downloaded. With that being said, I’d much rather see regular updates than have to beg for them as we used to, or not get them at all. When you look back at certain titles in their unpatched state, you’ll see missing content, features, and functionality that really needed to be there, as in these five examples. Please note that I’m intentionally excluding the 1998 rosters in NBA Live 99. While it’s a notable example of the phenomenon, all games inevitably launch with outdated rosters. These five examples are more unique side effects of a game being unpatched.

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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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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 a look at the habit that most basketball gamers struggle to break.

By now, many of the basic concepts and mechanics in basketball video games are well-established. That familiarity allows experienced virtual hardwood gamers to get acclimated with new titles swiftly, and in turn, enjoy them sooner. To that point, when there are major changes to an aspect of the core mechanics, it’s far more likely that the initial impressions will be negative, or at least mixed. Sometimes this is because the changes that have been implemented failed to improve upon the previous concepts. Other times, it reveals our inflexibility regarding certain habits.

There’s one habit in particular that I believe most of us have trouble breaking. It’s not entirely our fault, of course. Basketball video games encourage us to make habitual use of this mechanic. It represents a core aspect of playing the sport, and allows us to perform advanced moves. We’ve always had to be careful about how we use it, as its short-term benefits are balanced by finite availability and long-term drawbacks. As sim games in particular have become even more realistic and sophisticated, overuse of this mechanic has been exposed as a bad habit. I am of course referring to sprinting – or turbo, as it’s also been called – and our tendency to constantly move at top speed.

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Episode #360 of the NLSC Podcast is out now! Derek (aka Dee4Three) and I are your hosts for this weekly podcast that’s all about basketball gaming.

There continues to be a surge of interest in NBA Live 19, with several gamers picking it up again. This raises the issue of NBA 2K fatigue, and the other reasons – including accessibility, simplicity, and lack of predatory mechanics and toxicity – that gamers are eschewing the more up to date NBA 2K21 Next Gen. We once again note that the door is wide open for NBA Live. In our mailbag this week, we’re talking about purchasing digital NBA moments, and various obstacles that modders face. Are we likely to invest in digital NBA collectibles, and are Visual Concepts deliberately making modding more difficult?

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:34:45 — 65.1MB)

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Join in the conversation in the comments below, or here in the Forum! Additionally, feel free to hit us up with any feedback on the episode, as well as mailbag questions and topic suggestions for future shows. For more information on the NLSC Podcast including episode guides, check out this page in our Wiki. The show also comes out on our YouTube channel, so be sure to subscribe for future episodes and other video content.