Tag Archives: Format

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 ways that it’s getting hard to update old basketball video games.

As someone who originally got into modding basketball video games by updating NBA Live 96 more than a year after it had been superseded, I’m never going to tell anyone that they shouldn’t work on older titles! There’s novelty in updating an old favourite for the current season, combining today’s rosters with classic gameplay. Of course, it’s fun to go the other way too, winding back the clock in a new game so that we can virtually revisit and play through a nostalgic season with modern mechanics. I’ve found joy and satisfaction in tackling both kinds of projects over the years.

With that being said, continuing to update old favourites years and indeed decades after their release will only ever get tougher. Needless to say, this isn’t a new issue. Speaking from experience, choosing to mod an older release over a recent one has always meant that you’ll soon encounter technical limitations, demographic shifts, and other potential deterrents. Again, that’s not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t continue to play and update a favourite that stands the test of time. If you’re still having fun and are satisfied with what can be done, that’s ultimately what’s important. Nevertheless, if you’re looking to update older games, it would be wise to keep these things in mind.

Read More »

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 specific details that we can’t include in roster mods for various games.

There are a ton of creative things that our community has done with roster mods over the years. Sometimes the games have been conveniently flexible in what can be done with their roster files, while other times we’ve had to devise clever workarounds. For the most part, the community has been very understanding when limitations have stood in the way of 100% accuracy, especially when it comes to retro roster mods. At the same time, it usually requires some disclaimers to be posted. If you go back and look at the readme files for Lutz’s rosters, you’ll see FAQs addressing these concerns.

Unfortunately, there are some details that we just haven’t been able to include in roster mods for NBA Live and NBA 2K. It’s seldom been gamebreaking, but for those of us who strive for as much accuracy and detail as possible, it’s still a bummer. Of course, that’s also because they’re the kind of inaccuracies that invite messages telling us that we’ve “forgotten” to do something, even if the release notes are clear that it can’t be done due to technical limitations. Once again though, a vast majority of mod users do understand the situation after those limitations have been explained. I can think of five specific details that can’t be included in roster mods for one reason or another.

Read More »