Tag Archives: NBA Live 2000

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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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 pondering another historical NBA What If, specifically what if Shaq had stayed in Orlando in 1996?

Earlier this month, I reminisced about the 1996 offseason. It was always going to be nostalgic to me being the first offseason that I experienced after becoming a hardcore basketball fan, but on top of that, it turned out to be an extremely important one in NBA history. A number of notable names switched teams, either via free agency or blockbuster trade. Although they obviously hadn’t achieved legendary status as yet, the Draft Class of 1996 was nevertheless exciting and full of promise. And of course, Shaquille O’Neal joining the Los Angeles Lakers was the move of the offseason!

Needless to say, Shaq signing with LA not only drastically altered the future of the Lakers, but also the fortunes of the Orlando Magic. The move worked out for Shaq, though he has admitted to having some regrets about leaving Orlando in 1996. Now, hindsight is 20/20, and retired players have demonstrated that they don’t have any qualms about twisting stories to improve their image in the eyes of fans. Still, had Orlando handled the situation better, perhaps Shaq would’ve stuck around longer. It’s another interesting What If, so let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 things that I loved about my NBA Live 2004 Dynasty.

Back in May, I reflected on five things that I loved about my MyCAREER game with the Denver Nuggets in NBA 2K13. That was a fun trip down memory lane, so today I’m doing the same for my NBA Live 2004 Dynasty with the Chicago Bulls! Like my NBA 2K13 MyCAREER, my NBA Live 2004 Dynasty remains one of my all-time favourite basketball gaming memories and experiences. I’ve reminisced about both of them for Wayback Wednesday, but I wanted to revisit some of the key reasons that they were so memorable, and indeed more successful than a few of my other games.

After all, in theory it might seem like a good idea to take cues from games that turned out so well. It’s certainly worth keeping them in mind and having an approach that you know will generally work for you, but some of the things that make a franchise or career mode game so special just can’t be replicated. From the excitement of having a brand new experience to specific scenarios and circumstances, a certain amount of uniqueness goes a long way in those games becoming treasured memories. My NBA Live 2004 Dynasty was a combination of many things that make franchise modes an exciting journey, and these five were major factors in keeping me hooked for hours.

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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.

This week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays features it all: past, present, future, and both sim and arcade! Legends are doing their thing across an assortment of titles, but we’ve also got some current players putting on a show in NBA 2K26, as well as a future pairing linking up for an alley-oop thanks to a mod for NBA 2K16. The latest dazzling array of highlights come courtesy of ten different games from NBA Live 2000 all the way through to NBA The Run, which is always cool to see. It’s time to get fired up for another weekend on the virtual hardwood, so 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.

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 and acknowledgement of a few of the little things that used to make basketball gaming special.

For many years, NBA 2K games included the code “payrespect“. By punching this code into the Cheats menu, it unlocked the iconic red, white, and blue ABA ball. It was a toggle option, so once the cheat was entered and unlocked, you could switch between the regular NBA and ABA basketballs as desired. Obviously, it paired well with the ABA throwback jerseys, as well as ABA alumni such as Julius Erving and George Gervin. Making it an unlockable option was the right approach too, as the code was neither permanent nor had to be entered every time you played.

I realise that this probably doesn’t sound like a very exciting feature these days. If we’re talking about historical content and deep modes and features, modern games have plenty of that! Not many NBA 2K gamers are clamouring for the return of those old school cheat codes or an unlockable ABA ball. However, it’s not just about being able to change up the basketball that’s being used on the virtual hardwood or blacktop. It’s about all the little things that we’ve had and lost in basketball video games, be it NBA 2K or NBA Live. The fact that they weren’t necessarily popular features that everyone misses is part of what made those little things so special in the first place.

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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.

The 2026 NBA season is now officially in the books, but ball never stops here at the NLSC! Our community loves hitting the virtual hardwood and blacktop in a variety of titles and in all sorts of ways, and that continues to be apparent in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays. The countdown begins and ends with some spectacular and ambitious highlights from WNBA players, and in between there are poster dunks, big blocks, and other breathtaking moves. Nine different basketball video games are featured this week, from NBA Live 2000 through to NBA 2K26. 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.

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #630 of the NLSC Podcast!

Entering 2026, we had some plans and goals for the virtual hardwood. Since we’re rapidly approaching the middle of the year – no, don’t ask us where the time went – we decided to check in on how those plans are going! To that end, this week we’re joining the community in discussing our basketball gaming habits so far in 2026, from the selection of titles that we’re playing to the modes that have kept us hooked. We also recap a fun Parsec session with the Snes9x Super Nintendo emulator featuring a five-player co-op game of NBA Live 95 that was an absolute blast, and an intense four-player head-to-head showdown in NBA Hangtime that was ultimately decided in overtime.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 52:14 — 36.2MB)

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!

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 technical tips for anyone who’d like to get into retro gaming, in particular through the use of emulation.

There seems to be a growing interest in retro basketball gaming, and I love to see it! Obviously, people have been going back to old favourites or sticking with a treasured game for a long time now, but I’ve been noticing more enthusiasm for it in recent years. Whether it’s a case of NBA 2K fatigue, people reaching an age where they’re feeling more nostalgic, less stigma around retro gaming, or a combination of those factors, there’s a clear desire to revisit the classics. We’re keen advocates for that here at the NLSC, and moving forward, we’ll look to expand our retro gaming resources.

In that spirit, I’d like to share some technical advice for retro gaming, with a focus on emulation. Naturally there’s a certain charm to playing on original hardware – whether it’s a console or an older PC – and in some ways it’s definitely easier! There are many benefits to emulation though, whether we’re talking about retro console emulators or compatibility fixes to get old PC games up and running on a modern system. Thanks to the efforts of some talented people throughout the years, we’re at a point where emulation has greatly improved, and retro gaming is technically viable. You may encounter a few difficulties here and there though, so hopefully these tips will help.

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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 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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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #628 of the NLSC Podcast!

While it’s certainly exciting to be on the cutting edge of gaming technology, we’re not always in a rush to upgrade our hardware and play the (supposedly) most advanced versions of basketball video games. This week, we’re taking a look at why many basketball gamers often opt to stick with last gen hoops titles – ourselves included – and some of the benefits of delaying a jump to the next generation. We also touch on next gen elitism and gatekeeping – in particular, the “you’re broke” crowd – and the community shares their experiences in sticking with last gen basketball video games. Suffice it to say that it’s been a more common practice over the years than some people may think!

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:02:02 — 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!

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 saluting former NBA player Gary Grant, who celebrated his 61st birthday yesterday.

One telltale sign of a long-time hardcore NBA fan is the ability to recall some of the most obscure players from decades ago. Obviously it’s easy to remember the all-time greats that younger fans who weren’t even born yet have still heard of, and many of the other prominent players from yesteryear also stick in our minds. However, when you grow up obsessed with hoops – watching games, playing video games, collecting trading cards, reading magazines – you also remember the journeymen, deep bench reserves, and that one player who had a six-game stint with your favourite team!

That brings me to Gary Grant. Although I remember dozens of players from the 90s, I’m not inclined to profile all of them in Wayback Wednesday. To that end, Grant is definitely a special case! In addition to popping up in games I watched and becoming a very familiar face in packs of trading cards, he’s also been involved in some of my fondest basketball gaming memories. He also stuck around for more than a decade, which is no minor feat. It’s time to give Gary Grant his due on the real and virtual hardwood alike, so let’s take a look back…way back…

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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.

As is often the case, the Legends are out and strutting their stuff in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays! Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant both make multiple appearances in the countdown, with MJ getting a little fancy in the Jordan Challenge and Kobe pulling out a truly wild slam for the top spot. From poster dunks to a swat off the glass to an alley-oop thrown from midcourt, there’s a little bit of everything on display this week. Highlights from seven different hoops titles are ready to hype you up for a weekend on the virtual hardwood, so 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.

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.

The WNBA and its players recently came to a new agreement, so it’s only appropriate that there’s a WNBA highlight in this week’s NLSC Top 10 Plays! It’s joined by a selection of spectacular plays from current NBA players, stars from the recent past, and all-time greats alike. Indeed, with this week marking the 31st anniversary of Michael Jordan declaring “I’m Back“, you’ll also find a signature Air Jordan move performed in NBA 2K11’s Jordan Challenge. Ten entertaining plays from seven different titles are ready to get you hyped for a weekend on the virtual hardwood, so 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.