Tag Archives: NBA Live Domain

This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at my season in NBA Live 96 PC, playing with a 1998 roster update.

I’ll readily admit that sometimes it’s difficult to get my head around the fact that it’s been over 25 years since The Last Dance came to an end. To put it into perspective, in 1998, that would’ve been the equivalent of looking back at the New York Knicks’ 1973 championship season! It doesn’t feel like such ancient history when your own nostalgia is involved, and as a Chicago Bulls fan, the 1998 season is naturally quite memorable for me. Those memories also involve the virtual hardwood, as it was during the 1998 season that I made my first roster updates for NBA Live 96 PC.

It was also one of the first seasons that I tried to play along with in a video game. Not in NBA Live 98, mind you. Unfortunately, our family’s aging PC couldn’t handle that game, as I found out firsthand when I tried running the demo! Instead, I used NBA Live 96 PC and my aforementioned 1998 season roster update. Although it was ultimately another season that I didn’t complete, it’s nevertheless one of my favourite basketball gaming experiences, thanks to all of the effort that I put into it beyond simply playing the games. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 reflecting on when webrings and Yahoo! GeoCities were major parts of the basketball gaming community.

Want to make me feel old? It’s getting much easier the closer that I edge to forty, but an effective method would be to ask “Andrew, what do you mean by webrings, or Yahoo! GeoCities?” Yes, it’s a sign that I’m getting older, and that I’ve been online for a long time, and how much the internet has changed, that there are people who will wonder what I’m talking about when I mention Yahoo! GeoCities and webrings! In an era where it’s all about algorithms and SEO, with a number of platforms for content creation and self-promotion, they’re antiquated concepts indeed.

Still, like many things from the early days of the basketball gaming community that don’t need to make a comeback, they’re nevertheless nostalgic for those of us who remember them. At the same time, I’m also grateful that better solutions have been developed, because it certainly was the Stone Age of the World Wide Web. So, what’s the deal with webrings and Yahoo! GeoCities? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 my very first Friday Five, published ten years ago today.

As I always note in my introduction for Wayback Wednesday, one of the intended purposes of this weekly feature is to republish old articles, usually with some added commentary. Funnily enough, that was actually the subject of the very first Wayback Wednesday, as I posted an article that was no longer available on the site due to us switching content management systems. However, much like Jerry West winning the first NBA Finals MVP despite losing the series, this didn’t set a precedent! I’ve mostly opted for retrospectives and other game-oriented features over republishing articles.

Honestly, I do think that’s the right call, as it’s the optimal use of a weekly feature such as Wayback Wednesday. It’s handy to leave the door open to republishing lost articles and generally digging into our own archives, but I believe that basketball video games should always be the star of the show, so to speak. With that being said, since it is ten years to the day that I posted my first edition of The Friday Five, I’m reflecting on the beginning of my longest-running NLSC feature, as well as the topic that it covered. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 era during which the NLSC was hosted by the GameSpy network.

Having run the NLSC for over twenty years now, I can’t help reflecting on my long history in the online basketball gaming community. While it’s ultimately about the games we’ve played – and I obviously love revisiting them – our community does have an interesting history. There have been plenty of ups and downs, and some incidents that I’d rather forget. I’m not a fan of drama, so there are probably some stories I won’t ever tell, at least beyond some vague allusions. Many of us were young when we first joined the community, and several incidents stemmed from immaturity.

In other words, I’m not going to drop too many juicy tales about people who have made running the NLSC – normally a fun and fulfilling creative outlet – unpleasant from time to time. However, I’ll never pass up the opportunity to take a few shots at one of our former hosts: GameSpy. If you’re old enough, you may remember them for both their coverage of video games, and powering the online functionality in over 300 PC and console titles. They also provided hosting for sites like us, and while it kept us running, we were definitely hurt by it. Let’s take a look back…way back…

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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 the time I tried to get the NBA Live 98 demo to run on my family’s aging 486 PC.

As a teenager in 1998, making do with a 486 DX2/66 IBM compatible PC, there were few things I wanted as much as a shiny new Pentium. I mean, I wanted the Chicago Bulls to be featured on the Game of the Week, to win as many games as possible, and ultimately, take home the NBA Championship. I wanted to stay up late on weekends to watch the NBA and WWF, and play games. I wanted to create rosters for NBA Live 96, and upload them to my Geocities site, the NBA Live Domain. There was a girl at school I wished I was more than friends with. But yes, I wanted a Pentium.

How did that turn out? Well, I got to see quite a few Bulls games that year, many of which they won, and of course they went on to win their sixth NBA title in June. I did fill my weekends with basketball, wrestling, and video games. I continued to hone my skills as a modder, and the NLD began to develop a small but dedicated following. The girl at school…well, let’s not bring the mood down, here! We also didn’t get a new PC until a couple of years later, which led to me attempting to run the NBA Live 98 demo on our rapidly aging 486. How did that go? Let’s take a look back…way back…

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This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! In this feature, we dig into the archives, look back at the history of basketball gaming, and indulge in some nostalgia. Check in every Wednesday for retrospectives and other features on older versions of NBA Live, NBA 2K, and old school basketball video games in general. You’ll also find old NLSC editorials re-published with added commentary, and other flashback content. This week, I’m taking a look back at my old columns, the Midweek Patch Report and Webmaster News.

If you’ve been around the community for a long time or perhaps read some of my previous articles, you may know that I used to run a site called the NBA Live Domain before I took over the NLSC in August of 2001. It started out as a place for me to host my own patches for NBA Live, but after a while, I felt like branching out with feature articles and the like. I experimented with the odd opinion piece and even created a subsite dedicated to covering the real NBA, but the columns that stuck were the Midweek Patch Report, and Webmaster News.

Both were regular weekly columns that became fixtures of the NBA Live Domain until I closed the site in December 2001, in order to properly focus on updating and developing content for the NLSC. They were instrumental in my development as a content creator though, so join me today as I take a look back…way back…

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Welcome to this week’s edition of The Friday Five! The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to NBA Live, NBA 2K, and other basketball video games, as well as the real NBA, and other areas of interest to our community. The feature is presented as either a list of five items, or in the form of a Top 5 countdown.

If you’ve connected with us on Facebook or Twitter, you might have seen that this August marks the 20th Anniversary of the NLSC. As it happens, today also marks my 15th Anniversary as the NLSC’s Webmaster/Administrator. Time certainly flies; it seems like only yesterday that I was in high school, a couple of months short of turning seventeen, and being handed control of my favourite website. I’d like to think that for the most part, I’ve done a pretty good job in the role. While there have been some tough moments, I’ve certainly enjoyed running the NLSC, from creating mods and content to all of the discussions in the Forum. Well, most of the discussions!

I take pride in the work that I and the rest of the NLSC Team put into the site, as well as what our community has been able to achieve with modding and other ventures. Even though the NLSC is not my day job, my aim is to always approach it with professionalism and dedication, because I truly believe that we are a site with a great heritage. For twenty years – beginning as an NBA Live fansite, and in time expanding to cover NBA 2K and other basketball games – we’ve always been by basketball gamers, for basketball gamers. For this week’s Friday Five, I’d like to reflect a little on that heritage, and my involvement with it.

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