NLSC Your source for basketball video games.
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 the N64 version of NBA Live 99, and seeing if it can be suitably updated for the 1999 season.
While I do have fond and nostalgic memories of the Nintendo 64, it’s fair to say that the console hasn’t aged as well as other platforms. The 3D era was in its infancy, so on top of graphics that tend to be unappealing nowadays, many games display the teething problems of expanding into a new plane while designing game worlds and gameplay. Some of the best releases do still hold up, though very few of them tend to be sports games. The N64’s controller is a major culprit here, as it wasn’t ideal for several cross-platform genres.
Nevertheless, I was excited to get NBA Live 99 for N64 for Christmas in 1998. Due to the lockout of course, the game had to launch with final 1998 season rosters. This ultimately wouldn’t be a problem on PC, thanks to mods and official patches. As we were a long way from consoles supporting downloadable updates, those platforms were left out in the cold. We had to make do with the default rosters, or try our best to update them ourselves. With that being said, is it possible to make a sufficiently detailed roster update for NBA Live 99 on N64? Let’s take a look back…way back…