Tag Archives: Steals

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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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 “press steal to foul” is a lazy approach to designing defensive mechanics in basketball video games.

There’s a clear interest in and emphasis on skill-based mechanics in NBA 2K these days. From sweats in the online scene sneering “get good” to developer blogs touting a focus on representing the “skill gap”, there’s a belief that NBA 2K’s gameplay must be a worthy test of one’s reflexes and abilities on the sticks. Accessibility? Realism? Fun? Go play a mobile puzzle game if that’s what you want, you filthy casual! That’s the attitude that NBA 2K has been increasingly catering to, and gameplay has taken a dip in quality because of it. At least one game developer saw that coming.

The irony of course is that thanks to canned and animation-heavy sequences, to say nothing of artificial boosts, imbalance, and paying to skip the grind, it’s laughable to suggest that NBA 2K is a pure test of stick skills! Moreover, when the mechanics are broken or poorly designed, it becomes a test of a gamer’s patience and willingness to compensate for a flawed system, rather than their ability to be strategic and skilful. Like a carpenter with a dull saw and a headless hammer, we’re impeded by the tools we have at our disposal. In short, we need a game’s mechanics to work and be useful in order to expertly employ them. To that end, “press steal to foul” is lazy design.

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Patch 2.1 is now available for the PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X versions of NBA 2K26. As always, it should come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try restarting your console or Steam client, or checking for updates manually.

Basically, this is a minor follow-up to the previous patch. To that end, it includes all of the fixes and content updates that were in Patch 2.0, while addressing a couple of further issues. Notably, it also reverses a major change to the ball collision sensitivity that was made in the previous update, based on community feedback. The full patch notes are as follows:

• Returned the ball collision sensitivity on escape dribble moves to pre-Patch 2.0 levels based on community feedback. The improved responsiveness for well-timed, intentional steal attempts remains.
• Updated the shot meter to properly reflect the green window bonuses of the Poster Machine Takeover Ability.
• Resolved a reported hang that could occur when attempting to load a MyCAREER save.
• Fixed a hang following a press conference in the Out of Bounds story.

I’ve added the details for Patch 2.1 to the NBA 2K26 update history in our Wiki. Feel free to share any impressions in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion here in the Forum!

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 sharing 30 fun facts about NBA Live 95, in honour of the PC version’s 30th Anniversary.

Can you believe that it’s been some 30 years since NBA Live 95 came to PC? The calendar says so and the maths checks out, but it’s still tough to get my head around! In any case, three decades have passed since EA Sports’ basketball games made a triumphant return to PC, and in doing so, ultimately inspired the creation of the NLSC and our modding community. With that in mind – and since we didn’t end up running any “official” 30th Anniversary of NBA Live content last year – it’s only appropriate that we mark the milestone with another look back at this iconic game.

Obviously, between Wayback Wednesday, our previous anniversary content, and other features, I’ve covered NBA Live 95 rather extensively at this point. A game of its quality and importance deserves its due though, especially on an anniversary. And so, I’ve decided to compile 30 fun facts about NBA Live 95 to celebrate the occasion. As you can imagine, it’s difficult to find 30 things about the game that haven’t been said before, but there are a few points of interest that aren’t talked about all that often. Hopefully, some will be news to you! 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 why there was no steal button in the early NBA Live games on PC.

As a young basketball gamer back in the 90s, I grew up with some true classics. They weren’t perfect of course, and there were aspects of those games that confused and annoyed me. Over the years, as I’ve come to learn more about video game design and the hardware that allows us to play games, certain choices and limitations have made a lot more sense. That includes why the early NBA Live games on PC didn’t have a steal button, unlike their Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and PlayStation counterparts. I touched upon the reason when I discussed the history of keyboard controls, but the matter deserves a deeper dive via a video essay. Let’s take a look back…way back…

For anyone who has always wondered about the lack of a steal button in those early NBA Live games on PC, I hope that was illuminating! For those of you who started playing PC basketball games with a later title, I’m sure you’re glad that you didn’t have to deal with that limitation! As for me, it was satisfying to go back and get some answers that I could share with the community all these years later. Thanks as always to my fellow retro gamers for your support of Wayback Wednesday, and be sure to subscribe to the NLSC YouTube channel for more basketball gaming content, from video essays and retrospectives to highlight reels and Dee’s weekly Top 10 Plays.

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 limitations in basketball video games that actually have a sensible explanation.

It’s always frustrating when we encounter limitations in basketball video games that stand in the way of having fun with them. It’s even more frustrating when those limitations aren’t present in other games – in some cases, in the very same series – which suggests that it doesn’t necessarily have to be that way. However, that doesn’t mean that there weren’t technical roadblocks when a particular game was released, or a reason for a particular feature or function being designed a certain way. Quite often, there’s a sensible and reasonable explanation for these limitations.

Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make it less frustrating, especially if we don’t learn the reason until much later. Furthermore, in the early days of basketball video games, we couldn’t be blamed for dreaming big as far as the things we wanted to see, and video game developers have clearly had similar visions. To that end, some limitations have been overcome as technology has improved, and programmers have found a way to make ambitious ideas work. Even so, it’s important to acknowledge that there are sensible explanations as to why those limitations were once in place, or why a mode or feature is still restrictive by design. Here are five that we’ve often grumbled about!

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #465 of the NLSC Podcast!

Another NBA All-Star Weekend is upon us, but sadly, the event has basically lost its lustre for us. Call us grumpy old heads if you must, but we miss genuine competition in the midseason classic! On a brighter note, we had a blast partaking in All-Star activities in NBA Live 08 – including creating a 1988 dunk contest video, and enjoying a wild three-point shootout that went to a tiebreaker – as well as revisiting NBA 2K13 to play some Blacktop. As promised on last week’s show, we’re taking a deep dive into the most annoying mechanics in the history of basketball gaming, with our listeners also sharing their biggest frustrations on the virtual hardwood.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:55:56 — 80.0MB)

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!

Patch 4.0 has come through for NBA 2K23 on PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S, with the PC patch set to arrive on Friday morning. As always, it should come through automatically as long as you’re online. If it doesn’t, try restarting your console/Steam client, or checking for updates manually.

With Season 4 set to tip off in MyCAREER and MyTEAM, Patch 4.0 prepares NBA 2K23 for the forthcoming content. It also includes a number of player likeness updates, nerfs on-ball steals, and addresses an issue with the camera in Triple Threat Online, among other gameplay tweaks and technical fixes.

You can find the full release notes below, as well as in our update history for NBA 2K23 Current Gen and Next Gen over in the Wiki. As always, feel free to share your impressions in the comments below, as well as join in the discussion in our NBA 2K23 Forum.

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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 ways that your turnovers will be inflated in basketball video games.

In an era where stat-padding is encouraged – in real life and on the virtual hardwood – the turnovers column is one that you don’t want to fill. They indicate ballhandling blunders, and only serve to help the other team; especially live ball turnovers! Of course, a perfect game is easier said than done, as mistakes will happen. If you look at some of the best playmakers throughout NBA history, you’ll see that their turnovers are often high. The downside of handling the ball so often is that you will be targeted by master thieves, and you’ll have more passes to be intercepted or mishandled.

Turnovers in sim basketball games generally reflect the ways that players cough up the ball in real life, but the numbers can be inflated. The goal of representing real life mistakes can lead to contrived situations where the ability to keep control of the ball and make smart decisions is taken out of the user’s hands. In the worst case scenario, this leads to losses when the game decides that despite doing everything correctly, the user will commit a costly turnover at an inopportune moment. If nothing else, it will lead to inflated numbers that don’t quite tell the truth about a gamer’s ability to take care of the rock. Here are five ways that your turnovers are bound to be inflated.

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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 moments in basketball games that are very predictable.

In real basketball, there’s a phenomenon of knowing a shot is going in as soon as it leaves your hands. It just feels right, the arc looks perfect, and it’s almost like there’s a sixth sense about it. Of course, that confidence isn’t always well-founded, in which case you may end up looking like Nick Young! We can get a similar feeling when we see someone else shoot the basketball, either on TV or when we’re on the court. It’s why we’re so surprised to see the great shooters and clutch performers miss attempts that we were absolutely sure would splash through the net.

As an artificial representation of the sport, basketball video games naturally contain some telltale signs that make them far more predictable than real life. Predictability isn’t always a bad thing of course, particularly when it’s a favourable outcome. Even when it isn’t, you’re at least able to brace yourself for the outcome, perhaps avoiding getting your hopes up. However, like a spoiler for a film, TV show, or indeed a video game with an in-depth narrative, it can detract from the experience by removing a sense of anticipation, with certain actions feeling inconsequential. For better or worse, here are five of the most predictable moments found in basketball video games.

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