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NBA 2K24 Out Now; Mods Folder in PC Version

NBA 2K24 Out Now; Mods Folder in PC Version

NBA 2K24 is out now on all platforms! Whether you prefer to go digital or pick up a physical copy from a store, you can now get your hands on this year’s game. As previously mentioned, I’ve launched the appropriate sections in our Forum, as well as added the necessary categories to our Downloads database. I’ve also added pages for the Next Gen and Current Gen update histories to our Wiki.

Speaking of modding, the PC version of NBA 2K24 has an exciting development! While we still don’t have any official modding tools from 2K, this year’s game includes a mods folder by default. This means we don’t need to use an unofficial plugin to have the game load custom files. This is something we haven’t had since NBA Live provided us with CustomArt, and it should definitely make creating and installing mods much easier!

Indeed, we’ve already got our first NBA 2K24 mod release – shout out to SexCurryBeats! – so stay tuned for a separate bulletin after a few more mods have been uploaded. In the meantime, please feel free to share your impressions of the game in the Forum, as well as get into modding if that’s your scene! Once again, we’d appreciate any help keeping our Wiki resources for NBA 2K24 updated, but as long as you’re enjoying our facilities and content, that’s the main thing. We’ll have plenty of post-release coverage and content for NBA 2K24 in the weeks and months to come, so keep it locked to the NLSC, and have a great time on the virtual hardwood!

The Friday Five: 5 Underrated Aspects of Retro Content in Old Games

The Friday Five: 5 Underrated Aspects of Retro Content in Old 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 a list of five aspects of retro content in older basketball video games that is underrated.

Retro content has been a staple feature in basketball games for decades now. It’s one of the best additions in sim and arcade titles alike, as it’s a blast to play with the stars of yesteryear in addition to the current generation of players. The amount of retro content has steadily increased since it was introduced, progressing from historical All-Star teams to retro NBA teams and All-Time legends squads. With the addition of MyNBA Eras in NBA 2K23 (and its return in NBA 2K24), it’s fair to suggest that these days we have more retro content than ever before.

With that being said, retro content has indeed been around for a long time, and an admirable effort was made with it in many old games. In fact, while the quantity of retro content in basketball games has never been higher than it is in NBA 2K23, we can certainly point to ways that older favourites boasted better quality. If nothing else, there are some aspects of the retro content in older basketball games that are quite impressive, and not just for their era. In fact, I’d go so far as to call them underrated, or certainly underappreciated, especially as they made the most of the resources that were available to them at the time. Let’s take a look at five examples of these aspects!

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NBA 2K24 Modding Sections Launched, Season 1 Details

NBA 2K24 Modding Sections Launched, Season 1 Details

With the imminent release of NBA 2K24, the community is gearing up for another year of modding the PC version! To that end, I’ve created new categories for NBA 2K24 in our Downloads database, as well as the usual Modding and Tutorials & FAQs sections for the game in the Forum.

You can find those Forum sections and Downloads categories, as well as our other key NBA 2K24 resources, at the links below:

As always, we encourage the use of our upload facilities, so that we can preserve mods and tools for years to come. Please note that members of the Contributors group can immediately create topics in our Tutorials & FAQs section; otherwise, feel free to post them in the Modding section, and we’ll move your resource to Tutorials & FAQs as soon as possible. We’d also appreciate any help in maintaining our other community resources, such as the Wiki pages.

Additionally, there’s a new Courtside Report providing an insight into what to expect from Season 1 in MyTEAM and MyCAREER. A trailer has also been released, which you can check out below. Stay tuned for our post-release coverage of NBA 2K24, as well as another great year of releases from our modding community!

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March Modness 2023 Giveaway Winner: Pep

NLSC March Modness

This is a very late announcement, but since NBA 2K24 pre-orders are now open, we’re getting closer to having a prize to deliver! Congratulations to Pep, winner of our March Modness 2023 giveaway! Pep released some retro Charlotte Bobcats jerseys during March, and continues to do awesome work for NBA 2K14, all while upholding the spirit that our modding community was founded upon. Once again, his prize is a copy of the standard edition of NBA 2K24 PC. There’s still much to learn about NBA 2K24, though we do know that the PC version will be a prior gen port again this year.

A big thanks as always to everyone who entered this year’s March Modness contest, and continues to share their mods here at the NLSC! Don’t forget that we offer free and permanent file hosting for our modding community, in order to preserve these great releases for years to come. Whether you’re modding NBA 2K23, an older favourite like NBA 2K14 as Pep is, or indeed a very old NBA Live game, I encourage everyone to make use of our facilities. For more information on uploading and adding files to our Downloads database, be sure to check out this tutorial.

NLSC Podcast #486: Our Excitement Level for NBA 2K24

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #486 of the NLSC Podcast!

As we await the next round of news and previews, how hyped are we for NBA 2K24? Along with the community, we rate our excitement on a scale of one to ten. Of course, some of us break the scale in both directions! We also recap what we’ve been playing this past week, including a surprising session of NBA Live 18, testing out a work-in-progress mod for NBA Live 08, throwing it back with NBA Basketball for Intellivision, and tackling a tough challenge in NBA Jam: On Fire Edition. There’s also some more virtual hardwood elitism on Twitter to push back on, and the reveal of some interesting clutch ratings in this week’s mailbag trivia.

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!

The Friday Five: 5 Frustrations Lacking A Good Workaround

The Friday Five: 5 Frustrations Lacking A Good Workaround

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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NLSC Podcast #484: NCAA Basketball, NBA 2K18, & Damian Lillard

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #484 of the NLSC Podcast!

The community has spoken: whether it comes from EA Sports, 2K Sports, or indeed both, many of us are very keen to see a new college basketball game! From licensed players and gameplay to presentation and features, we join the community in discussing our expectations for a hypothetical NCAA title. Elsewhere, we’ve noticed a couple of Tweets attempting to rehabilitate NBA 2K18’s image. Naturally, we have a few thoughts on that! We also discuss Damian Lillard’s trade request and big contracts for NBA role players, react to the recent separation of EA Sports and EA Games, and open up this week’s mailbag for some NBA 2K17 Overall Ratings trivia.

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!

NBA 2K19 Classic Seasons Project Now Includes 1996

NBA 2K19 Classic Seasons Mods

Fantastic news for NBA 2K19 gamers who have been waiting to play with more Classic Seasons! Stildo33 has updated the project with a roster for the 1996 season, which was of course a very memorable campaign. In case you missed it, the 1987 and 1995 seasons have also been added since my previous bulletin, meaning that the project now features a decade of rosters!

As with the other rosters in the NBA 2K19 Classic Seasons project, the 1996 mod is a comprehensive retro conversion. It features accurate player faces, along with proper jerseys, courts, and logos. A ton of effort has gone into the ratings and tendencies, as well as the suggested slider tweaks, to provide an authentic retro experience. Indeed, if not for the quality of the graphics, it’s all too easy to forget that you’re playing a game originally released for the 2019 season! Details such as the NBA on NBC scoreboard definitely help as well.

Note that both the rosters and art pack are distributed the old fashioned way, so the servers being offline isn’t an issue. However, in order to play with the 1996 rosters, you’ll need to download the entire pack again. You can find it here in the NBA 2K19 Modding section of the Forum, along with previews, installation help, and news on further updates. Congratulations to Stildo33 and company on another outstanding release!

The Friday Five: 5 Player Absences You May Not Remember

The Friday Five: 5 Player Absences You May Not Remember

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 absences in various basketball video games that you may not remember.

What’s a sure sign that someone has been playing basketball video games since the 90s? They remember a time when sim titles weren’t guaranteed to feature every player in the NBA! These days, the agreement with the Players’ Association allows all active players to be represented in licensed video games. Roster updates will take care of anyone who’s missing at launch, adding new players as the season progresses. Back in the day, we had to resolve player absences ourselves, either by customising our own rosters, or downloading community-made updates whenever possible.

Even if you don’t remember those days from personal experience, you’ve probably seen and heard people like me talking about them! As such, prominent examples of player absences like Michael Jordan and Charles Barkley are well-known. There have been some other noteworthy player absences through the years however, some of which have likely been forgotten. Since I enjoy NBA and basketball game trivia, I’m sharing five examples of potentially overlooked player absences that I recall. Please note that I’m referring to players who were absent when they were still active in the league, so historical players that remain unlicensed in NBA 2K don’t count here.

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Wayback Wednesday: Revisiting My 1998 Roster for NBA Live 96 PC

Wayback Wednesday: Revisiting My 1998 Roster for NBA Live 96 PC

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 my 1998 season roster mod for NBA Live 96 PC.

It’s overwhelming to think that the NLSC has been around for more than a quarter of a century! Our founders tipped things off in 1996, I took over in 2001, and we’re still around all these years later. Through all the ups and downs, moving to different hosts, and putting up with some nonsense along the way, we’ve managed to outlast a ton of websites. We’ve also outlasted more than a couple of basketball video game series (and indeed, video game studios and publishers). Unfortunately we’ve lost some mods and resources along the way, but we’ve still got some fun stuff from the early days.

To that end, our archives have preserved some of my earliest roster mods for NBA Live 96 PC. Upon discovering the NLSC in 1997 and all of the work that people in the community were doing, I was inspired to try my hand at some modding as well. I released that work through my own site – the NBA Live Domain – and felt immense pride when our founders added it to the database of mods on the NLSC. How do I feel about those mods today? It’s been a while since I’ve played with or taken a long look at them, so I thought I’d start by revisiting my 1998 roster for NBA Live 96, which I actually co-credited to my cousin Clinton. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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The Friday Five: 5 Factors Drawing Me To Older 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 a list of five factors that are drawing me towards playing older games rather than more recent titles.

I’ll be the first to admit that I have a predisposition for playing older games, basketball or otherwise. My earliest forays into gaming came with a system that was already outdated before I was born, thanks to the Video Game Crash of 1983. I’m also a creature of habit prone to sentimentality and nostalgia, so I’m not one to readily throw the past away and never look back. I didn’t always have the latest hardware growing up, so sometimes I had to stick with the older games that I could run. It’s why I was still keen to update NBA Live 96 PC as others were gearing up for NBA Live 98.

Old habits die hard, so it’s no surprise that I remain open to playing older games, even though I own and can play more recent releases. Still, it’s not just nostalgia that has me reaching for old favourites over the last few NBA 2K games. It’s part of it, sure, but in all honesty, as far as my experiences on the virtual hardwood, I’ve had more fun going back to NBA 2K14 and an assortment of other older titles. Even though I was impressed by NBA 2K23 – and all of its nostalgic content – I soon put it aside to play my favourites from yesteryear, as well as search for new retro kicks. When I reflect upon it, there are five main factors that are continually drawing me to older games.

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Wayback Wednesday: 25 Years Since The Last Dance

Wayback Wednesday: 25 Years Since The Last Dance

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 reflecting on it being 25 years since the Chicago Bulls’ sixth championship, aka The Last Dance.

I admire fans who continue to support teams that haven’t won a championship, or even had the opportunity to compete for one by making it through to the NBA Finals. As rough as it’s been to be a Chicago Bulls fan in the 21st century, I’m comforted by the memories of watching their incredible run in the 90s. That’s not to say that I don’t want to see them get back there, but I had it pretty good growing up as a Bulls fan; far better than fans of most other teams! As such, with so many bandwagoners, and fans that follow players rather than teams, I respect loyalty to clubs despite tough times.

Of course, those memories of the glory days are getting further into the past! To put it into perspective, there were fewer years between Bill Russell’s last championship and Michael Jordan’s first, than there are between MJ’s first ring and today. Sure, that’s just how the passage of time works, but it doesn’t make it any less wild to get your head around! As the 2000s became the 2010s, and the 2010s became the 2020s, every Bulls title began passing milestones that would’ve felt like such a long time ago to a kid like me in the 90s. As an adult in 2023, it seems like it was only yesterday! And now, The Last Dance is a quarter of a century old. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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1993 NBA Finals Using NBA Jam: Legends On Fire Edition

1993 NBA Finals Using NBA Jam: Legends On Fire Edition

Dee and I have discussed the NBA Jam: Legends On Fire Edition mod for NBA Jam: On Fire Edition at length on the NLSC Podcast, and we’ve also had johnz1 on the show to discuss the project. It’s something that we’ve been waiting for years to see, and we’ve had a blast connecting on Parsec to play with it! Recently, we used the mod to replay the 1993 NBA Finals matchup of the Chicago Bulls vs. the Phoenix Suns.

With Dee as the host and controlling Scottie Pippen, I took control of Michael Jordan as we battled Charles Barkley and Kevin Johnson. Even with our experience playing co-op together and the skill of MJ and Pip, Sir Charles and KJ proved to be an extremely challenging matchup. Needless to say, Dee recorded our arcade take on the 1993 NBA Finals, and put together another fantastic highlight reel for the NLSC YouTube channel!

We’re consistently uploading great basketball gaming videos to our YouTube channel these days, an initiative that Dee has been spearheading with gameplay reels for a multitude of hoops titles, not to mention the weekly Top 10. I’ve also posted a couple of video retrospectives for Wayback Wednesday recently, including NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, so be sure to subscribe for more virtual hardwood fun!

NLSC Podcast #475: Getting Fired Up To Virtually Hoop

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #475 of the NLSC Podcast!

How does our enthusiasm for real basketball and the NBA motivate us to play video games? This week, we’re joining the community in reminiscing about the games and other circumstances that made us want to pick up a controller and hit the virtual hardwood! We also reflect on the very enjoyable but underrated AND1 Streetball for PlayStation 2, and marvel at the attention to detail on the women’s teams in NCAA March Madness 99, following a session with both games. There’s also been some great news for NBA 2K23 modding, while a play from last week’s Top 10 inspires a brief look back at the wide variety of instant replay angles in NBA Live 2000 PC.

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!

NLSC Podcast #474: Talking ESL & More With KingJMASE

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #474 of the NLSC Podcast!

This week, we’re joined by one of our favourite streamers and content creators in the basketball gaming community, KingJMASE! Mase shares the story of founding the Elite Street League for NBA 2K, and the inspiration behind his commentary style. We also discuss the challenges of content creation, including time management and tempering expectations, as well as the importance of authenticity and originality. Mase also recalls his history with basketball games and basketball, and recounts one of his most impressive performances on the virtual hardwood. Finally, we wrap up a fun conversation by putting him in the hot seat to answer five rapid fire questions about real and virtual hoops alike.

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!