Tag Archives: NBA Live 95

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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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 how you don’t have to miss the basketball video games that you used to play.

Between our personal accounts and the NLSC’s socials, Dee and I frequently share short clips, highlight reels, and screenshots from various basketball video games. Because we love the classics, sometimes we’ll go a long way back with those posts. It seems that many of our fellow basketball gamers appreciate that hit of nostalgia, as we’ll get replies reminiscing about epic battles, players that were a blast to use, and interesting details that are impossible to forget. It’s fun to go back, which is why we have Wayback Wednesday and our deep dives on the NLSC Podcast.

However, in the midst of all the nostalgic delight, there’s a recurring comment that always jumps out at me: “I miss this game”, or words to that effect. It makes sense. There’s obviously a wistful aspect to nostalgia, wishing that you could go back to a specific time if only briefly. Of course, like favourite books, TV shows, and movies, you can revisit and continue to enjoy video games many years later. You don’t have to miss any of the classic games that we spotlight here or on our social media channels! At the same time, I do get it. There are a variety of reasons why you may not be able to play old video games, but if doing so is feasible, you needn’t have to miss them.

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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 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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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #627 of the NLSC Podcast!

We’re back on the air after an unfortunate technical mishap last week, and we’re ready and eager to take a deep dive into the somewhat overlooked PlayStation version of NBA Live 96! After recapping a couple of our sessions with the game and reflecting on the nostalgic 1996 lineups for the four featured teams, we take an in-depth look at the features and on-court experience, break down the detailed results of a simulated season, and draw comparisons to the 16-bit and PC versions along the way. We also join the community in discussing which version (or versions) of NBA Live 96 we owned and played the most back in the day, and nominate which one we’d currently say is our favourite.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 57:04 — 39.6MB)

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!

Since the heyday of NBA Live modding, our community has made use of the original portraits from the PC versions of NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96. Some have been useful for cyberface creation, and they’ve often been put to use as era-appropriate portraits in various retro rosters.

However, while those assets have been extracted and shared many times over the years, it’s been a while since there’s been a readily-available pack. At the prompting of one of our community members after posting some screenshots of NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 PC on our socials, I’ve gone ahead and extracted all of those portraits as bitmap files. You can download them as a pack here.

Although a majority of the returning players in NBA Live 96 use the same portraits as in NBA Live 95, I did extract those textures from both games, so there are doubles between both folders. Please note that I’m presenting these files as-is for any modding projects for NBA Live and NBA 2K alike. For more information on creating custom portraits and cyberfaces, please consult an appropriate tutorial. Unfortunately, for the most part I can’t help you out there (especially when it comes to faces).

Hopefully, this pack will be useful for retro roster modders. We remain committed to supporting the modding community in any way we can, from our upload facilities to guides and resources. If you have any suggestions or would like to lend a hand in that regard, please let us know!

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 I’m just as passionate about getting rebounds on the virtual hardwood as I am racking up assists.

I’ve spoken at length about my love of tallying assists in video games. It all began with MyCAREER in NBA 2K13, where my player – a shooting guard – was thrust into the role of starting point guard when Ty Lawson went down for the year with an injury. One of the dynamic goals challenged me to break Fat Lever’s team record for assists in a single game, and that was that. In future games, my MyPLAYER was a point guard, built to get dimes. This carried over into playing online with NLSC THRILLHO, as I relished setting up the guys to score.

However, assists aren’t the only statistical column that I enjoy filling up in basketball video games. I also really relish getting rebounds! There’s something so satisfying about snaring a board, whether I’m controlling all five players or I’m locked to my career mode avatar. Indeed, on the couple of occasions that I’ve created a big man instead of a playmaking point guard, I’ve switched my focus from dropping dimes to cleaning the glass. Mind you, given how averaging a triple-double in MyCAREER becomes a habit when you have the strategy down pat, my point guards grab a lot of boards as well. Whichever game and however I’m playing, I truly do love rebounds.

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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 Fast Break, a PC basketball game developed by Accolade

Over the years, thousands of classic video games have been made available to buy digitally. Game preservation is important, and it’s fantastic that GOG (and to some extent, Steam) are keeping retro favourites alive. Of course, securing the rights to certain games is tricky when the studios that made them cease operations, or they’re bought out by other companies. When it comes to sports games, licensing makes it even more difficult. These two factors are why we don’t see too many old basketball games being re-released on digital platforms; especially those that are NBA-licensed.

However, there is one “ancient” basketball game that – as of writing – is available to purchase on GOG and Steam: Fast Break. Developed and published by Accolade for MS-DOS and Commodore 64 in 1988, and Amiga, Apple IIGS, and Mac in 1989, it’s a contemporary of Electronic Arts’ Lakers vs. Celtics and Jordan vs. Bird. The rights to Fast Break and other Accolade titles ended up with Ziggurat Interactive, who re-released it in 2021. So, what is Fast Break like, and how does it compare to other pioneering basketball video games? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #622 of the NLSC Podcast!

There’s a lot of fun to be had taking on the CPU solo or co-operatively in basketball video games, especially with the range of modes at our disposal. However, head-to-head play is also a blast, and we have countless memories of epic battles with friends, family, and online opponents. This week, we join the community in recalling the best players that we’ve ever faced on the virtual hardwood, and some of the lessons that we took from those showdowns. We also recap a fun game of NBA Live 2000 PC that demonstrated just how superbly it holds up more than 25 years later, and touch on some of the downsides of skill-based mechanics when it comes to realism and lucky plays.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 54:12 — 37.6MB)

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 provides five more corrections to errors in previous articles.

It’s been a while since I last issued some corrections to errors I’ve made in previous articles, so that must mean I’ve been completely accurate since then! Well, possibly not, though once again going back and correcting my mistakes a couple of times now has encouraged me to be more thorough with my research and fact-checking. I’d like to think that I’ve been successful in those efforts, though when you are your own editor and fact-checker, you’re definitely at risk of oversight! Whenever that happens, the best that you can do is to be transparent and provide the necessary corrections.

Obviously, that includes editing the original articles and adding the relevant footnotes, which I recently did for my NBA Jam 99 retrospective. However, I also believe that there’s value in spotlighting my mistakes like this. It feels even more transparent, as edits to the original articles can go unread. Additionally, it gives me the opportunity to dive back into those topics with the accuracy I wish I’d had the first time around, and share some interesting stories and trivia. I’d also prefer to be someone who can admit when they’re wrong and learn from their mistakes, rather than just double-down out of foolish pride. To that end, here are five more errors in my articles that I must correct!

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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 finding basketball gaming’s answer to Tecmo Super Bowl.

Tecmo Super Bowl is undoubtedly an iconic video game. Fully-licensed NFL teams and players, well-designed gameplay, stat tracking, and the dominance of virtual Bo Jackson, all helped cement it as a legendary release. That legend has only grown over time, thanks to emulation facilitating a modding scene that has kept the game dutifully updated and enthusiastically played right through to today. When it comes to a cult following in the retro gaming and modding scene, Tecmo Super Bowl is right up there with the original Doom games.

Basketball is my sport however, so I’m left wondering: is there an equivalent retro hoops title to Tecmo Super Bowl? For that matter, could there be? Obviously, there are a handful of old favourites still being updated, but these days those titles rarely approach the same vintage as Tecmo Super Bowl. It stands to reason. It could be argued that sim basketball games that hold up decades later didn’t come along until the mid 90s, or even the mid 2000s. Once they evolved to that point, we ended up with several great releases that remained moddable and playable years later. With that in mind, which titles could potentially be basketball gaming’s Tecmo Super Bowl?

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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 regarding the All-Stars in various basketball video games.

Another All-Star Game will be upon us next week. I admit that I highly doubt I’ll be watching it. What was once a spectacular exhibition of the best players in the NBA competing in the ultimate pick-up game has turned into a boring display that we can’t even call basketball. From the lack of effort by a spoiled generation of players to ridiculous formats under the tournament-obsessed Adam Silver, the All-Star Game absolutely stinks now. It’s a damn shame, as its spits on the legacy of all the great players who paved the way for today’s “stars” to get paid $40 million to load-manage.

Whoops, I went full Grumpy Old Man there! It is tough not to grumble though, as the All-Star Game used to be something I really enjoyed. Sadly, over the past decade or so, it’s completely lost its appeal and competitive spirit. I still have fond memories of what the event used to be of course, and that also carries over to the virtual hardwood. Over the years, it’s been a blast to play with the All-Star teams in games, as well as the Rookie Challenge/Rising Stars squads when they’re available. As with many other aspects of basketball video game rosters though, the virtual All-Star teams have had some rather weird and interesting inaccuracies. Here are five that I’ve encountered!

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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 going back to NBA Live 95 to trade players and create jersey swaps that represent their past stints.

Since another trade deadline is upon us, I feel like putting some players in different jerseys! Last month, I fired up NBA Live 95 for Super Nintendo to create some jersey swaps that represented future stints for a bunch of players. As I said in that article, I really enjoy the combination of video game nostalgia, NBA history, and a challenging exercise. Furthermore, I’ve always found the jersey swaps for traded players in NBA Live 95 for SNES to be a cool feature, one that I’ve come to appreciate even more on a technical level as a solution to the limited storage space on cartridges.

So, let’s talk about past stints for players that we can trade in NBA Live 95 SNES. As someone who really got into basketball in the mid 90s, I tend to associate the players from that era with the teams they were playing for when I first started watching the NBA and playing basketball video games. Of course, I soon found out that a number of players had begun their career elsewhere. It was sometimes difficult to imagine; a retroactive familiar faces in strange places situation! We can depict some of those past stints in NBA Live 95 using jersey swaps, 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.

There’s never a dull moment when it comes to the NLSC Top 10 Plays, but it’s always special when something rare and unique happens on the virtual hardwood. That certainly describes the #1 play this week, a sequence that gives a whole new meaning to the term “lucky bounce”! The rest of the countdown brings the goods too, as you’ll find the usual assortment of exciting dunks, flashy passes, and other smooth moves that leave defenders in the dust. Five different games are featured this time around, from NBA Live 95 all the way 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.

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 useful hacks we’ve been able to utilise in basketball video games.

Although “hacks” and “hacking” are terms that have come to be associated with acts that are malicious or unscrupulous uses of technology, they also refer to inelegant yet quick, creative, and effective solutions in programming. Indeed, Al Lowe – the creator of Leisure Suit Larry – described the method of using one background picture and four mostly transparent cells to create the bamboo maze in Leisure Suit Larry 3 as being his favourite hack. Ironically, this means that while many people disdain the term “life hacks”, it’s actually using “hack” in a similar context to software development!

To that point, modding involves hacks; not just the process of breaking into the game files and altering them, but cobbling together solutions utilising functionality that was intended for developer use, or in a way that was otherwise unintended. This list of the most useful hacks in basketball video games is a mixture of values we discovered we could change to mod or unlock content, and hidden or unadvertised functionality that we can make use of. To that end, we could certainly debate as to whether all of them strictly qualify as hacks, but there’s no doubt that they were useful! And so, without any further ado, here are five ways that we’ve been able to cleverly tinker with games.

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