Tag Archives: Lockout

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 transitional rosters of the 1999 lockout season, as captured in NBA Live 99 PC.

It’s been 25 years since a lockout led to NBA games being cancelled for the first time, with the threat of an entire season being lost. I’ll admit that I wasn’t paying attention to the looming labour crisis as a teenage Chicago Bulls fan in 1998. I was focused on following the action, hoping that Michael Jordan would win another scoring title and the Bulls would end the year as champions once more. The rumours that concerned me were that it would be The Last Dance, which it obviously was. Furthermore, the magazines I was reading weren’t really covering it, and NBA Action definitely wasn’t!

Fortunately, the season was saved when ultimatums were issued – though, it wouldn’t be the last labour dispute – and the 1999 lockout ended on January 20th, 1999. On top of shortening the 1999 campaign to 50 games, it also meant that video games such as NBA Live had to launch with final 1998 season rosters. Fortunately for PC gamers, EA Sports released an official patch that not only fixed a few bugs, but updated the game for the new season. As such, NBA Live 99 PC in its updated state does preserve the rosters from a weird, yet memorable season. Let’s take a look back…way back…

Read More »

Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This week’s Five is a list of five small ways that basketball games have gone that extra mile in their details.

The small details in basketball video games are a funny thing. It’s possible to obsess over them too much, to the point of nitpicking. Nothing makes us appear to be an unpleasable fanbase quite like overreacting to a minor error or missing detail that most people would never notice, and hardly ruins the entire game. At the same time, attention to detail is important, and we do notice when games go that extra mile in order to be fun and immersive. Even if it’s purely cosmetic, we’re likely to say “hey, that’s awesome” once we’ve seen it.

It may be a detail that we can barely see during gameplay, but it adds authenticity that we can appreciate when replays take us closer to the action. It may be functionality that improves the quality of the experience, or contributes to the atmosphere. In some cases, it may even be content that gets patched in, adding a level of detail that we didn’t expect. Whatever the case may be, the developers went that extra mile to make the game better in small ways. I’m sure we all have our favourite examples of little details that impressed us when we discovered them, and so today I’m sharing five of mine, in no particular order. Hats off to the developers for these efforts!

Read More »