Tag Archives: Modding

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 some thoughts about whether playing games from the past and enjoying historical rosters is the future of my basketball gaming.

More than a week after NBA 2K27’s release, I still don’t have the game. Thinking back, the last time that I didn’t get a new game at launch would’ve been NBA Live 2002 back in 2001, and that’s only because it was a Christmas present along with my PlayStation 2. To that end, it’s been 25 years since I’ve waited this long post-launch to pick up the latest basketball video game. Even when I had to wait longer for a game to come out here in Australia, I was still getting it on what was Day 1 for us, or within a week or so at the very least.

Funnily enough, I’ve rather enjoyed connecting with Dee to play NBA 2K27 over Parsec. In fact, I’m optimistic that I might like it more than its recent predecessors based on my experiences so far. It’s possible that by taking a break from playing the latest NBA 2K, it finally feels fresh enough to dive back in. At the same time, leaning into my predisposition for retro gaming has also made me extremely comfortable with playing old favourites and developing an appreciation for classics that I overlooked. Indeed, the longer that I delay picking up NBA 2K27, the more that I wonder if I’ve reached a point where the future of my basketball gaming actually lies in the past.

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While our modding community’s attention has obviously turned to NBA 2K27, a number of people are obviously still going to be playing and tinkering with NBA 2K26 for the foreseeable future. To that end, you’ll be pleased to know that Daex has recently released a version of his Sigil modding tool for NBA 2K26, which is similar to the utilities that he’s created for NBA 2K14 and NBA 2K27.

Check out Sigil 2K26 at the link below! As I’ve noted before, there have been some drastic changes in the attitude and approach of the NBA 2K modding community in recent years, so we’re very grateful to people like Daex who are freely releasing both mods and modding utilities such as this tool for NBA 2K26. If you have any feedback about Sigil 2K26 or the versions for NBA 2K14 and NBA 2K27, be sure to hit up Daex via private message in the Forum, or alternatively get in touch with him via the NLSC Discord.

Daex
Sigil 2K26

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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 some thoughts on seeking fun in flawed games.

Given the choice, I’d much rather play basketball video games that are great across the board. Obviously, no game is absolutely perfect or bug-free, but the strongest releases provide us with far more joy than frustration. Thankfully, there have been a number of such basketball games over the years. Even when the latest release hasn’t resonated with me, a library of favourites – and a predisposition for retro gaming – has allowed me to find some way of hitting the virtual hardwood. I’m not stuck labouring to make the best of flawed games whenever I want to indulge my love of basketball.

And yet, there’s something fascinating about seeking fun in flawed games! When you consider that Bart vs. the Space Mutants is a nostalgic favourite despite how flawed it is, I’m sure it’s no surprise to hear that I’m oddly drawn to bad basketball games as well. Granted, it’s harder to appreciate flawed basketball games compared to terrible platformers and other genres, particularly sim titles given the inevitable comparisons to real life and the expectations that come with that. Nevertheless, as I’m revisiting various titles as part of my retro basketball gaming, I can’t help but be intrigued by some of the most flawed releases, and the challenge of squeezing fun out of them.

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As you may have seen, wiscard_rush recently released a ROM hack for Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside for Nintendo 64 that takes the game back to the 1996 season. He’s now released an NBA Courtside roster editor, allowing the community to work on their own ROM hacks for the game.

Once again, it’s very exciting to see these developments with retro basketball gaming and modding. Emulation is seemingly opening up new modding opportunities all the time, and while our community is turning its attention to NBA 2K27, we do have people who enjoy playing and tinkering with old favourites; myself included. Getting a roster editor for Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside after all these years is also interesting as it allows us to view player ratings, which are infamously hidden for all original players.

Check out the tool at the link below, and shout out to wiscard_rush for all of his efforts developing mods, ROM hacks, and utilities! We definitely appreciate the hard work, and the willingness to freely share it for everyone to enjoy.

wiscard_rush
Kobe Bryant’s Courtside Roster Editor

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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 some retro modding, namely tinkering with rosters in the Xbox 360 version of NBA 2K6.

When I get hooked on a game – really hooked – it takes a while to get it out of my system. In fact, even then there’s a good chance that it’ll hang around in my rotation, if nothing else becoming a fallback option when I’m not sure what to play. If there’s any way that I can spice up those sessions with some modding – particularly minimalist modding – then that becomes part of my fascination with a game. Whether it’s putting together makeshift retro squads in NBA Live 10’s Fantasy Teams mode, or creating something more substantial, it prolongs my interest in a classic title.

That brings us to the Xbox 360 version of NBA 2K6. It’s a game that I’ve come to love long after it was released, as I noted when I covered it for Wayback Wednesday with a comprehensive retrospective. It’s been in and out of my rotation over the last couple of years, which eventually led me to tinker with its rosters. At first, it was just a way of getting more out of the game by setting up some fun scenarios, but I soon found myself dabbling with projects that I wanted to release publicly. It’s been a fun exercise so far, so let’s see how I’ve been going back…way back…to mod!

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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 fun discoveries that I’ve made while manipulating cutscenes in basketball video games.

Compared to mechanics, controls, and other design choices and technical aspects, cutscenes aren’t vital to great gameplay on the virtual hardwood. Nevertheless, they’re still an important part of the presentation. If you go back and look at some of our early Wishlists for NBA Live, you’ll see that gamers wanted future titles to add on-court cutscenes for championship celebrations and so forth. Even with the more primitive graphics of the era, such cutscenes would be far more immersive than generic videos or a slightly fancier “A Winner Is You” type of screen upon winning a title.

That wish would ultimately be granted, and for the past couple of decades or so, basketball video games have featured a host of cutscenes from the starting lineup introductions and trophy presentations to cinematic career mode stories and other flavour content. Unsurprisingly, we’ve discovered ways of manipulating many of the cutscenes for greater immersion, content creation, or just our own amusement. I’ve certainly enjoyed dabbling with various titles’ cutscenes for those purposes, and all of the fun and interesting discoveries regarding how they’re assembled, odd bugs and restrictions, and workarounds to get the results that I want. Here are five examples!

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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 some reflections (and a few untold stories) as I mark 25 years of running the NLSC.

On August 25th 2001, Tim officially announced that I’d be succeeding him as the NLSC’s webmaster. It was already August 26th here in Australia, so that’s the date of my first post on the site. Whichever date you want to use, this time of year marks my anniversary of taking the reins here at the NLSC. It’s mind-blowing to think that at this point, I’ve been running the site for more than half of my life! To that point, it’s truly surreal to be able to say that as of this week, I’ve been doing this for a quarter of a century now.

As the years have gone by, I’ve made it a point to mark my anniversary in some way, whether via a social media post or a feature here on the site. Just to be clear right out of the gate: this isn’t a retirement announcement! As I’ve said before, it’s tough to say how long I’ll do this, or to even consider the end of my involvement with the site and what will happen thereafter. It’s very much a “we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it” situation, because as long as I’m willing and able to channel my enthusiasm for basketball gaming into content creation, I’m going to keep having fun doing so. That’s why as I celebrate 25 years at the helm of the NLSC, I believe I still have work to do.

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For those who are interested in tinkering with NBA Bounce, wiscard_rush has uploaded a new version of his modding tool for the PC version. The new release adds support for mesh editing, with a new tab that allows you to view, export, and replace the 3D models. Download it at the link below, and check out the tool’s Github page for more information!

wiscard_rush
NBA BOUNCE Modding Tool (Updated to V3.0.0)

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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 another look back at a fictional comeback for Larry Bird that took place in an NBA Live 95 PC Season game.

Yesterday marked 34 years since Larry Bird announced his retirement from the NBA, just ten days after winning a gold medal with the Dream Team. While Larry Legend may not have been completely ready to retire, his ailing back wasn’t up to the rigours of another NBA season. As it was, he’d missed a combined 57 regular season games in 1991 and 1992, sat out the All-Star Game both years, and played only four of the seven games in the Boston Celtics’ second round loss to the Cleveland Cavaliers in what would be his final NBA Playoffs series.

Therefore, it wasn’t surprising that unlike Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson, Larry Bird never made a comeback after hanging up his Converse sneakers. Whereas the MJs were fit enough to resume their NBA careers, Bird’s health simply didn’t allow it. Of course, even simulation basketball video games can take a break from reality. To that point, as my cousin Clinton and I played further into our Houston Rockets Season in NBA Live 95 PC, we sought to keep things interesting with silly ideas, including having Larry Bird make a comeback for us. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 some reflections on what inspired me to mod NBA 2K10, and continue to explore ways to update that roster.

When NBA 2K10 was released, it didn’t become an instant favourite. A couple of the other members of the NLSC Team at the time encouraged me to pick it up, since we were making inroads into covering the NBA 2K series following its arrival on PC the previous year. While I understood the benefits of expanding our content and wanted to facilitate that, I hadn’t been able to get into NBA 2K9 myself, and honestly wasn’t optimistic that NBA 2K10 would win me over either. Sure enough, I didn’t like NBA 2K10 much more than its predecessor, owing to controls that just didn’t click with me.

I was also still flying the flag for NBA Live; perhaps less enthusiastically than before, but it remained “my brand”. Mind you, between it being a console-only release and a couple of quibbles with the gameplay following the official patches, I wasn’t entirely keen on NBA Live 10 either. Since then of course, I’ve developed a new appreciation for NBA Live 10, and it became a major retro gaming kick for me. Likewise, NBA 2K10 is now a game that I greatly enjoy. I was even motivated to mod NBA 2K10, creating a fixed roster that added missing Legends and a few other enhancements to the game’s final official update. You may fairly ask though: why, after all these years?

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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 details in old games that I miss.

Even though I’m nostalgic for my earliest basketball gaming memories and believe that many old titles are still extremely enjoyable today, I won’t pretend that the genre hasn’t come a long way. Indeed, even within the first few years of being a basketball gamer, I was seeing and reaping the benefits of some impressive innovations. While I haven’t been entirely satisfied with the on-court experience in the current generation of NBA 2K titles – to put it mildly – the games are as deep as they’ve ever been, with some cool features that I could’ve once only dreamed of.

With that being said, there are some details in old games that have disappeared over the years, and I certainly miss them. In all fairness, I can’t argue that all of them are absolutely vital, or that their absence actively detracts from my enjoyment. In fact, some of them had already fallen by the wayside by the late 90s or early 2000s, so they’re absent from many of my all-time favourite games over the past two decades. Of course, while they may not be necessary for a basketball game to rank among the all-time great releases, they were still special. They undoubtedly helped establish my love of basketball gaming, so I do miss seeing these details from those old games.

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For those who’d like to try their hand at tinkering with the PC version of NBA Bounce, wiscard_rush has updated his modding tool for the game! The latest version features some bug fixes and new functionality, including the ability to modify save files. Check it out at the link below!

wiscard_rush
NBA BOUNCE Modding Tool (Updated to V2.1.1)

Thanks to everyone who continues to contribute to our Downloads database! If you need help uploading files, be sure to check out this video tutorial. For more information about downloads, the modding community, and Mod Releases bulletins, please see this FAQ in our Wiki.

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 NBA Live 10 needed to have.

Although a couple of the eighth generation NBA Live releases garnered a moderately positive reception, or at least inspired a dedicated following, it’s generally agreed that NBA Live 10 was the last very good game in the series. There are several long-time basketball gamers who have gone so far as to deem it to be the best NBA Live. While I’ve developed a much greater appreciation for NBA Live 10 after revisiting it back in 2021, I wouldn’t go that far. It ranks up there for me, but I believe NBA Live 06 PC is better in terms of depth, polish, and overall quality relative to the time it was released.

Nevertheless, NBA Live 10 was a high point during a rough period for NBA Live, and not just because it cleared a low bar. It was outsold by NBA 2K10 and wasn’t as highly-regarded, but it was still well-received and seemingly a sign that the series was on the right track. That momentum regrettably went to waste, but at least we got one undeniably good NBA Live release on PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360! Looking back though, it’s clear that NBA Live 10 lacked some things that it absolutely needed to have. Here are five that not only could’ve made it the best NBA Live, but may have also avoided all the disasters that led to the series’ downfall and dormancy as of 2026.

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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 old school roster modding techniques that – for the most part – stopped being necessary in newer titles.

When it comes to modding – roster or otherwise – there are some techniques that have remained fairly similar across decades of games, and even between different series. With rosters, the ratings and other attributes need to be accurately assigned so that players perform as expected. Many of the basic techniques of modding textures and models for faces, jerseys, courts, logos, arenas, and so forth apply to multiple games, though the specifics and necessary tools may certainly differ. If nothing else, while there may be some unique steps, there’ll be familiarity in the process and results.

Mind you, there have also been some noticeable differences as basketball games have become more sophisticated, and changed their file formats. As someone whose entry into roster modding came with NBA Live 96 for PC, I can absolutely attest to that! To that point, I enjoy looking back at how the hobby has changed throughout the years. I’m undoubtedly glad that changes to the games have made roster modding easier, but I’ll admit that I do have nostalgia for the techniques we had to use in the early days. It inspired us to problem-solve and to be creative in our solutions; something I believe that these five old school roster modding techniques demonstrate! Let’s begin with…

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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 some reflections on how maintaining roster updates used to help keep me engaged with the NBA.

Although I still consider myself a hardcore basketball fan, I’m not as engaged with the NBA as I once was. There are reasons for this, of course. First and foremost, I’m not enamoured with the style of play that’s taken over the league. I believe that analytics have been extremely damaging to basketball as a spectator sport, to say nothing of the discourse surrounding it. To that point, the coverage has become obnoxious, and very disrespectful to NBA history. And of course, as I’ve gotten older, the players have gone from adults that I admire to generational peers to kids I struggle to relate to.

On top of all that, I’m no longer making current season roster updates for any NBA Live or NBA 2K titles. There are reasons for that, too. My lack of enthusiasm for the current NBA doesn’t inspire the necessary motivation to work on those mods. Also, whenever I start toying with the possibility of updating a game for the current season, lingering burnout from my final years of maintaining roster updates for NBA Live quickly puts an end to that idea. In that respect, my passion for the NBA and roster updates for video games were symbiotic. Keenly following the NBA inspired me to create roster updates, but creating roster updates also kept me hooked on the NBA.

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