Tag Archives: Inaccuracies

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 inaccuracies and other issues that have bothered me while basketball gaming.

Even the best basketball video games have had issues and inaccuracies. Perfection is basically an impossible bar to reach, and coding a sophisticated video game of any genre is hardly as simple as typing plain English into a word processor! Also, some ideas simply just don’t pan out. And so, we accept that our favourite hoops titles will have imperfections. In the best case scenario, it doesn’t stop us from enjoying them. Mind you, because we’re passionate about basketball and basketball gaming alike, any major inaccuracies and technical issues are naturally difficult to ignore.

Of course, these issues and inaccuracies don’t always ruin basketball video games. As I said, even our favourite games have them, and we all have different standards and expectations besides. With that being said, while technical problems, inaccuracies, and other issues may not completely spoil a game, they can still end up bothering us. The good ultimately outweighs the bad, but they’re still the finer points that we can’t help but notice, and would like to see fixed and improved upon for an even better experience. To that end, while the following five issues and inaccuracies didn’t stop me from having fun on the virtual hardwood, they were nevertheless a bit annoying!

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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 noteworthy and recurring inaccuracies that we’ve found in basketball video games over the years.

Licensed sports titles are judged differently to other genres of video games. Because they’re aiming to depict a real sport played by real athletes, we expect accuracy. Even in arcade games with all of their breaks from reality, there’s an expectation that the players will resemble their real life counterparts, and that their ratings will reflect their strengths, weaknesses, and overall style of play. The bar is set much higher in sim titles, especially as technological improvements have led to increasingly realistic graphics and gameplay. Above all, we expect attention to detail.

Of course, none of us are infallible, and thus human error is inevitable. As anyone who’s ever worked on a roster mod can attest, it’s all too easy to overlook a jersey number, neglect a needed ratings update, or forget to double-check the spelling of a newly-added player’s name. That’s not even getting into leaving a necessary file out of the update, or any other technical mistakes! Still, it’s interesting to discover some of the inaccuracies that made it into the default rosters, especially before official roster updates were commonplace. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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