Tag Archives: NBA Live 06

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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Get ready for more fantastic highlights from the basketball gaming community in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, curated by Dee! New and old games alike are featured in this celebration of spectacular moments on the virtual hardwood. To submit your clips, post them in this topic, send Dee a message, or hit him up on X.

NBA 2K27 is officially out for everyone, and unsurprisingly, it’s heavily featured in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays after debuting in last week’s countdown. Indeed, it’s taken the top two spots thanks to some clutch shooting from Tyrese Haliburton and Caitlin Clark, which lifted their respective Indiana teams to thrilling victories. The old favourites aren’t forgotten though, as NBA Live 2005, NBA Live 06, and NBA 2K14 also provided some exciting plays, including a timely use of Freestyle Superstars. Need some inspiration to hit the virtual hardwood this weekend? Let’s get to the action!

What was your favourite highlight this week? Sound off in the comments below, and once again, get in on the fun by sending us your best plays! Remember, as long as it’s a basketball game, it’s eligible for the countdown. Also, don’t forget to subscribe to us on YouTube for more basketball gaming videos.

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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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 interesting facts about Wilt Chamberlain.

Today would’ve been Wilt Chamberlain’s 90th birthday. As an Elder Millennial, Wilt was obviously before my time. However, as a newly-minted basketball fan some 30 years ago, he was unsurprisingly one of the first Legends that I learned about. When you score 100 points in a game, average 50.4 ppg, and play an “impossible” 48.5 mpg – all in the same season, no less – future generations of hoop heads will know your name! I was fascinated to hear about those records and his legendary rivalry with Bill Russell, not to mention tales of his incredible athletic feats.

Growing up as a basketball fan in the 90s, Wilt Chamberlain was to me what Michael Jordan is to younger fans nowadays. In fact, from the way that older fans insisted that he was better than MJ to remarks on the subject from Wilt himself, the discourse and debates involving LeBron James nowadays feel very familiar! It’s why I understand where younger fans are coming from, though I do feel that there used to be far more reverence for NBA history. In any case, I enjoyed learning about Wilt Chamberlain back in the day, and I’ve been delighted to learn even more since then. With that being said, here are five interesting Wilt Chamberlain facts that you may or may not know.

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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 the freeze-frame player introductions in seventh gen NBA Live 07 and NBA Live 08.

For all the talk about how as we grow older we also grow more close-minded, I have to say that when it comes to basketball video games, I’ve had the opposite experience. When I was a younger basketball gamer, I was very particular about certain aspects of the virtual hardwood. Not only did I struggle to enjoy sim titles that felt different to NBA Live, but I had some rather strict criteria and a few petty gripes when it came to critiquing my favourite hoops series. That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with having strong preferences, but I definitely took some things way too seriously!

To that end, while I do stand by some of my criticisms all these years later, I have lightened up about other things that used to bother me. An obvious example is the comedic cutscenes in NBA Live 2003. While I still think they went a little overboard with them and they’re not the tone I’d prefer in a sim game, I can find the humour in them nowadays, and appreciate how they gave the game character. The freeze-frame player introductions in NBA Live 07 and NBA Live 08 are another example of a stylistic choice that I’ve warmed up to. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 reasons that I’ve shelved and abandoned my basketball video game saves over the years.

For a franchise or career mode gamer, there’s nothing better than getting hooked on a title and seeing a season (or several) through to the end. As I’ve said before – and I stand by it – completion is what we make it on the virtual hardwood. When it comes to sim games in particular, I don’t believe that it’s necessary to win a championship – or even just finish an entire season – to have enjoyed a title and feel that you got your money’s worth out of it. In fact, I’ve yet to play through at least one season from start to finish in several of my all-time favourite basketball video games!

That’s not to say that I don’t wish that I did, or that I wouldn’t be open to doing so as a retro basketball gaming experience now. Moreover, it doesn’t mean that I didn’t try to finish seasons in those old favourites. Unfortunately, those attempts were derailed, and so countless saves ended up being shelved and eventually abandoned. Mind you, while some abandoned and lost saves represent wistful What Ifs, others either were successfully completed, or I had very good reasons to quit while I was ahead! I’m sure this is something that many basketball gamers can relate to, so let’s look a look at five reasons I’ve shelved and abandoned saves, along with a few memorable examples.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #639 of the NLSC Podcast!

Gaming in 2026 – basketball or otherwise – is certainly a mixed bag! There are definitely some things that we’re greatly enjoying about our hobby right now, but with that being said, there are also various issues that are really bugging us! To that end, this week we present Dee’s Dislikes and Andrew’s Delights! In these two segments, we get some criticisms off our chest from issues with NBA The Run to anti-consumer practices, while also celebrating what’s bringing us joy at the moment, such as retro gaming and exciting modding discoveries. In response to this week’s community question, our listeners also share some of their recent delights and dislikes, on the virtual hardwood and beyond.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:02:08 — 43.0MB)

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify

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!

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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It’s time for another round-up of recent uploads to the NLSC YouTube channel! Since the last bulletin, Dee and I have been playing an assortment of games, including NBA The Run, which has produced plenty of highlights. I’m a little behind in uploading some of the videos I’ve had planned, but Dee has been consistently sharing some of our best virtual hardwood moments.

We’ve had a lot to say about NBA The Run before and after its release, and while we have our criticisms, it’s also produced several highlights. In addition to including some of the highlights in the NLSC Top 10 Plays of the Week, Dee has been showcasing the gameplay in both the beta and full versions of NBA The Run via a handful of reels.

Some of Dee’s other uploads include highlights from our four and five-player games of NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 for Super Nintendo, and four-player head-to-head showdowns in NBA Hangtime and NBA Jam: On Fire Edition, from our Sunday Parsec sessions with wiscard_rush, KidKash202, and KingKongFresh00. You can also find highlight reels from NBA 2K11 PS2, NBA Jam 2004, NBA Live 2000, NBA Live 09, NBA Live 10, and NBA Bounce.

As I mentioned, I’m overdue to share highlights from my solo basketball gaming sessions, but I did upload a preview of the work-in-progress ABA roster for NBA Live 06. It’s a project that I’m aiming to spend more time on during the offseason, with an eye to getting a release out as soon as possible. I also uploaded highlights from a makeshift classic teams showdown in NBA Live 10, featuring the 2006 Nets and Suns.

Catch up on all of the recent uploads below! As always, please subscribe to the NLSC YouTube channel if you haven’t already. In addition to gameplay highlights, there’s also the weekly Top 10 Plays, full episodes of the NLSC Podcast, and the occasional video essay or retrospective. Additionally, if you have any suggestions of games that you’d like to see us play, please let us know and we’ll try to get them into the rotation!

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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 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.

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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 the PlayStation 2 version of NBA 2K6.

Some 20 years ago, I picked up the PlayStation 2 version of NBA 2K6. Although I was a long-time NBA Live fan who was extremely satisfied with the PC version of NBA Live 06, I’d heard many good things about the NBA 2K series. Of course, for some reason, back then the PAL versions of NBA 2K were being released months after their North American launch. As such, on top of NBA Live being my brand of choice and preferring to play on PC besides, a midseason release didn’t offer much incentive to give NBA 2K a chance to win me over.

Nevertheless, while browsing at a game store sometime after the PAL release of NBA 2K6 in March 2006, the PlayStation 2 version caught my eye. I decided to try it, just to see what all the fuss was about. To be completely honest, I didn’t enjoy the game. It felt and looked too different from what I was used to, and the controls didn’t impress me. To that end, I very quickly returned it. Since then however, the Xbox 360 version of NBA 2K6 has become one of my favourite games, so I was interested to see if the PlayStation 2 release would finally win me over. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 modding projects that we could undertake to enhance retro basketball gaming.

As I’ve said before, we’re keen advocates of retro gaming and modding here at the NLSC! We’ll always cover new games and support the modding community in any way that we can, but we have a deep appreciation for the classics and don’t want there to be any stigma to revisiting them. There’s unquestionably a dedicated group of basketball gamers who feel as we do. One only has to look at the people who have been playing and updating NBA 2K14 PC for over a decade, or johnz1’s modding projects for NBA Jam: On Fire Edition.

Indeed, considering that our founders were providing tools for NBA Live 95 when NBA Live 96 was already out, modding has been helping to breathe new life into older titles since our community was formed! Quite a few of my modding projects have also centred around keeping old releases alive, from my earliest forays into modding NBA Live 96 to keeping the last four PC versions of NBA Live updated after the series went console-only. As I’ve been leaning more and more into my predisposition for retro gaming – and noticed others sharing that interest – I’ve been thinking about modding projects that would enhance the experience. Here are five!

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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 reminiscing about NBA 2K8 making a cameo during the story in NBA 2K19 MyCAREER.

MyCAREER stories have undoubtedly been hit or miss. From the way they impact the gameplay experience to the quality of the stories themselves, some have managed to enhance the mode, while others have unfortunately detracted from it. For me, “The Way Back” – the story of NBA 2K19’s MyCAREER – was one of the stronger tales. It took us along a very different path to the NBA, with some genuinely captivating story beats. Sure, there’s a glaring plot hole that could’ve easily been avoided with only a slight change to the ending, but even that makes it interesting!

With that in mind, “The Way Back” is definitely one of my favourite MyCAREER stories. It also helps that the developers got creative in adding interactive elements beyond the usual gameplay. Not only did we have character and dialogue choices, but there were also hoops-related activities ranging from a barnyard pickup game to mini basketball at a fair. This also includes a memorable tribute to the history of the NBA 2K series, as our MyPLAYER ends up playing NBA 2K8 during the course of the NBA 2K19 MyCAREER story. 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 thoughts on the importance of injuries in basketball video games.

Just like any other sport or physical activity, injuries are an unfortunate inevitability in basketball. From hard collisions and rough landings, to dirty play and simple wear and tear, there’s a possibility of getting hurt. Injuries have altered the course of series, seasons, and entire careers. You could say that they’re one of the leading causes of What Ifs! To that end, because injuries have a significant impact on the NBA, it only makes sense that they’re part of basketball video games. I’m mostly referring to the simulation games, but there’s a place for them in arcade titles as well.

Sure, in the moment, you may not be exactly thrilled to see injuries occur. You don’t necessarily want to see your virtual players get hurt any more than you’d wish for the injury bug to bite your favourite teams and players in real life. There are undoubtedly times when you’d prefer not to suffer any injuries on the virtual hardwood, so you’ll switch them off in the gameplay settings accordingly. If they’re unavoidable – such as being a story beat in MyCAREER – they can be extremely frustrating. However, I can attest that injuries have actually enhanced a handful of my franchise and career mode games. As such, they’re conspicuous by their absence in titles that don’t feature them.

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