Tag Archives: Player Introductions

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 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. This week’s Five is a list of five artistic choices in basketball video games that proved to be divisive.

It’s likely that at some point, you’ve heard the fable of “The miller, his son, and the donkey.” It’s the go-to fable whenever you want to illustrate that you can’t please everyone; or, to use the wording of the moral that’s appended to certain versions of the fable, “if you try to please all, you please none.” The fable is talking about actions, but the message holds true for art and entertainment as well. Whether it’s a video game, tabletop game, film, TV series (or an individual episode thereof), album, song, poem, drawing, painting, or whatever…nothing receives universal acclaim.

After all, it’s impossible for a single work to cater to everyone’s individual taste with its artistic choices. Of course, some artistic choices tend to evoke more extreme responses and opinions than others. They’re the proverbial “love it or hate it” artistic choices, with very little in between. It’s also interesting that some of the most divisive aspects of basketball games are generally inconsequential artistic choices that don’t inhibit the core gameplay experience. Atmosphere is still important though, and a gaudy art style can be off-putting. With that in mind, here are five of the most divisive artistic choices that we’ve seen in various aspects of basketball video games.

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