Tag Archives: Sim Engine

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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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 once again revisiting NBA Live 95 for the Super Nintendo, in order to demonstrate how Dominique Wilkins can break the game.

There are several reasons why I enjoy revisiting classic basketball video games. So many titles remain a blast to this day, so I love hitting the virtual hardwood in them. Also, there’s always the possibility of discovering something new, whether it’s a cool feature or mechanic that I overlooked, an explanation for a design choice or technical issue, or a fun bit of roster trivia. And of course, if you mess around with a game, you might stumble across something truly weird! That’s what happened when I reversed the Dominique Wilkins for Danny Manning trade in the Super Nintendo version of NBA Live 95. Here’s a video breaking down a rather unexpected sim engine outcome!

I hope you enjoyed this exploration of a weird phenomenon that we can create in NBA Live 95’s Season mode! I’ll have to mess around a little more and see if I can find any other players that are capable of having the same impact as Dominique Wilkins when traded. In the meantime, let me know if you’ve encountered any sim engine oddities like this one, and also be sure to subscribe to the NLSC’s YouTube channel! In addition to in-depth game retrospectives, essays, and features like this, you’ll also find plenty of gameplay highlight reels, the weekly NLSC Top 10 Plays curated by Dee, episodes of the NLSC Podcast, and 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 recalls another five times I encountered real life moves being made by CPU-controlled teams in my games.

As I’ve previously discussed, it’s difficult to determine what constitutes a realistic or unrealistic trade or signing by CPU-controlled teams in franchise and career modes. After all, the real NBA has seen a number of lopsided deals, unexpected departures, and unlikely reunions. At the same time, too many highly unlikely deals, or downright illogical moves such as readily trading away your best player in the midst of a good season, are examples of unrealistic trades that sim heads don’t want to see. Still, we have to acknowledge that reality can sometimes be stranger than fiction!

To that end, some of the real moves that have coincidentally happened in my career and franchise mode games might seem far-fetched, if not for the fact that they came to pass. While four of the examples that I’m sharing today happened after the fact, one of the moves did actually occur in my game before it became a reality, making it eerily prophetic. Whether they serve as surprisingly accurate predictions or they’re simply fun coincidences, I do enjoy seeing CPU-controlled teams making moves that turned out (or will turn out) to be real; even if they don’t involve any big names. With that being said, let’s get to five more examples of my games imitating real NBA moves!

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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 a look at the worst virtual NBA Finalists that I’ve encountered in all my years of basketball gaming.

Simulation engines are far from infallible. They already have a tough task as far as generating realistic results, given that the actual NBA can produce some unexpected outcomes. However, some of the results we see in our virtual seasons are definitely unrealistically favourable to upsets and underdogs. It makes me wonder about the articles that simulate the forthcoming season in NBA 2K. Did they run with the first simulation, or did they have to keep trying until the game produced more believable results, with realistic NBA Finalists and Champions?

Having finished seasons in multiple games, I’ve encountered a variety of virtual NBA Finalists, including a few surprising ones. The Minnesota Timberwolves in Year 3 of my NBA 2K14 MyCAREER would definitely qualify as such a squad. Indeed, when I mentioned to Dee4Three that they were my opponent, and sent him a screenshot of their roster, he observed that they were a strong candidate for the worst team to ever make the NBA Finals. Dee suggested that they merited a closer look in an article, and I liked the idea; especially as it got me thinking about some of the other virtual NBA Finalists I’ve faced in games, and whether any were as weak as those Timberwolves.

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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 mistakes that were very common in the Season modes of older basketball titles.

Disclaimer: just because basketball video games have come a long way, it doesn’t mean that we can’t criticise modern releases. It’s fair to respectfully point out issues and ways that they could improve, and to expect value for money as a consumer. With that being said, if it’s been a while since you dusted off a really old game, it’s easy to overlook just how far they’ve come. Broadly speaking, one of the most significant improvements to the genre has been establishing a standard approach to core modes such as Season, Franchise, Career, Card Collecting, and so on.

I know phrases such as “in their infancy” and “it was the Wild West!” are somewhat cliché, but frankly, when basketball games were in their infancy, it was the Wild West when it came to how they designed certain features! EA Sports and Tecmo pioneered many of the design principles for modes based on the NBA season that have since become the standard approach. As such, if you revisit an old NBA Live or one of the NBA Playoffs games, or Tecmo Super NBA Basketball, you’ll find Season modes that clearly laid the foundation for modern titles. They had some drawbacks of course, and other games were also employing some rather unusual ideas in their Season modes.

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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 annoying stats bugs that have shown up in various basketball games over the years.

Stats in basketball video games are perhaps just as important as they are in the real NBA. Sure, we want to see life-like animations, realistic strategy, and play games that feel good on the sticks, but accurate scores and statistics are a major factor in having as much realism as possible in a sim-oriented title. Even if you’re a gamer who takes a more casual approach to the accuracy of simulated and user-generated stats, chances are you’re interested in the stat-tracking aspect of basketball games, especially if you enjoy putting up big numbers on the virtual hardwood.

Unfortunately for gamers who care about stats one way another – whether it’s posting huge numbers every game, or enjoying a realistic style of gameplay with more true-to-life performances – various games have featured annoying bugs related to the in-game statistics. From undesirable sim engine results to errors with stat tracking and displays, these glitches have adversely affected some aspect of the numbers that are accumulated on the virtual hardwood. Be it a lack of accuracy or just a feeling of accomplishment that you feel cheated out of, here are five of the most annoying stats bugs that have been encountered in basketball video games.

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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 DSTATS in old NBA Live games.

For an enthusiastic franchise mode gamer, detail is paramount. On top of having a quality gameplay experience throughout the schedule, our enjoyment of a franchise mode is driven by the depth of the features, as well as the accuracy and realism of trades, free agency, and player performance. Simulated player stats that are wildly inaccurate can really detract from the franchise experience, especially during the first couple of seasons which are usually expected to somewhat resemble reality. The sim engine is an area where basketball games have greatly improved over the years, but in earlier NBA Live titles, realistic stats were achieved through the use of DSTATS.

DSTATS data provided the development team and modders alike with greater control over simulated player stats, but the approach also had a few noteworthy drawbacks. It’s an outmoded concept, but one that’s interesting to revisit, so let’s take a look back…way back…

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