Tag Archives: Super Nintendo

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 technical tips for anyone who’d like to get into retro gaming, in particular through the use of emulation.

There seems to be a growing interest in retro basketball gaming, and I love to see it! Obviously, people have been going back to old favourites or sticking with a treasured game for a long time now, but I’ve been noticing more enthusiasm for it in recent years. Whether it’s a case of NBA 2K fatigue, people reaching an age where they’re feeling more nostalgic, less stigma around retro gaming, or a combination of those factors, there’s a clear desire to revisit the classics. We’re keen advocates for that here at the NLSC, and moving forward, we’ll look to expand our retro gaming resources.

In that spirit, I’d like to share some technical advice for retro gaming, with a focus on emulation. Naturally there’s a certain charm to playing on original hardware – whether it’s a console or an older PC – and in some ways it’s definitely easier! There are many benefits to emulation though, whether we’re talking about retro console emulators or compatibility fixes to get old PC games up and running on a modern system. Thanks to the efforts of some talented people throughout the years, we’re at a point where emulation has greatly improved, and retro gaming is technically viable. You may encounter a few difficulties here and there though, so hopefully these tips will help.

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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #627 of the NLSC Podcast!

We’re back on the air after an unfortunate technical mishap last week, and we’re ready and eager to take a deep dive into the somewhat overlooked PlayStation version of NBA Live 96! After recapping a couple of our sessions with the game and reflecting on the nostalgic 1996 lineups for the four featured teams, we take an in-depth look at the features and on-court experience, break down the detailed results of a simulated season, and draw comparisons to the 16-bit and PC versions along the way. We also join the community in discussing which version (or versions) of NBA Live 96 we owned and played the most back in the day, and nominate which one we’d currently say is our favourite.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 57:04 — 39.6MB)

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!

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 weird roster glitches that I’ve encountered in basketball video games over the years.

The harsh reality of video game design is that no release is ever going to be absolutely perfect. Of course, absolute perfection is an impossible goal in just about any creative endeavour, and you’ll also never be able to please everyone with your design choices. On top of that, bugs are basically inevitable. They were present in classic games, and we certainly see them in modern titles. Whether it’s Super Mario Bros. 3, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, or NBA 2K26, it’s just not feasible to code a game that has absolutely no technical issues or imperfections.

Ideally, bugs and glitches will be rare, or have minimal impact on the experience. The best video games – basketball or otherwise – tend to be extremely stable for the most part. There have been some frustrating bugs in basketball video games over the years though, including glitches related to roster editing. They can be particularly nasty, causing us to lose saved data and in turn countless hours of work customising a game. As someone who has enjoyed tinkering with games and creating roster mods since the 90s, I’ve encountered several weird glitches and badly-designed editing functions. These five are among the strangest and most annoying that I’ve experienced to date.

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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 provides five more corrections to errors in previous articles.

It’s been a while since I last issued some corrections to errors I’ve made in previous articles, so that must mean I’ve been completely accurate since then! Well, possibly not, though once again going back and correcting my mistakes a couple of times now has encouraged me to be more thorough with my research and fact-checking. I’d like to think that I’ve been successful in those efforts, though when you are your own editor and fact-checker, you’re definitely at risk of oversight! Whenever that happens, the best that you can do is to be transparent and provide the necessary corrections.

Obviously, that includes editing the original articles and adding the relevant footnotes, which I recently did for my NBA Jam 99 retrospective. However, I also believe that there’s value in spotlighting my mistakes like this. It feels even more transparent, as edits to the original articles can go unread. Additionally, it gives me the opportunity to dive back into those topics with the accuracy I wish I’d had the first time around, and share some interesting stories and trivia. I’d also prefer to be someone who can admit when they’re wrong and learn from their mistakes, rather than just double-down out of foolish pride. To that end, here are five more errors in my articles that I must correct!

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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 finding basketball gaming’s answer to Tecmo Super Bowl.

Tecmo Super Bowl is undoubtedly an iconic video game. Fully-licensed NFL teams and players, well-designed gameplay, stat tracking, and the dominance of virtual Bo Jackson, all helped cement it as a legendary release. That legend has only grown over time, thanks to emulation facilitating a modding scene that has kept the game dutifully updated and enthusiastically played right through to today. When it comes to a cult following in the retro gaming and modding scene, Tecmo Super Bowl is right up there with the original Doom games.

Basketball is my sport however, so I’m left wondering: is there an equivalent retro hoops title to Tecmo Super Bowl? For that matter, could there be? Obviously, there are a handful of old favourites still being updated, but these days those titles rarely approach the same vintage as Tecmo Super Bowl. It stands to reason. It could be argued that sim basketball games that hold up decades later didn’t come along until the mid 90s, or even the mid 2000s. Once they evolved to that point, we ended up with several great releases that remained moddable and playable years later. With that in mind, which titles could potentially be basketball gaming’s Tecmo Super Bowl?

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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 going back to NBA Live 95 to trade players and create jersey swaps that represent their past stints.

Since another trade deadline is upon us, I feel like putting some players in different jerseys! Last month, I fired up NBA Live 95 for Super Nintendo to create some jersey swaps that represented future stints for a bunch of players. As I said in that article, I really enjoy the combination of video game nostalgia, NBA history, and a challenging exercise. Furthermore, I’ve always found the jersey swaps for traded players in NBA Live 95 for SNES to be a cool feature, one that I’ve come to appreciate even more on a technical level as a solution to the limited storage space on cartridges.

So, let’s talk about past stints for players that we can trade in NBA Live 95 SNES. As someone who really got into basketball in the mid 90s, I tend to associate the players from that era with the teams they were playing for when I first started watching the NBA and playing basketball video games. Of course, I soon found out that a number of players had begun their career elsewhere. It was sometimes difficult to imagine; a retroactive familiar faces in strange places situation! We can depict some of those past stints in NBA Live 95 using jersey swaps, so 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 it being 30 years since I bought the PC version of NBA Jam Tournament Edition, aka NBA Jam TE.

These days, I have a sizeable collection of basketball video games – I’m overdue to take a new photo with the additions that I’ve made since 2022 – but it all had to start somewhere! As it happens, I purchased my very first basketball video game 30 years ago yesterday. That game was of course NBA Jam Tournament Edition, or NBA Jam TE as it’s also commonly known. A minor technical issue prevented me from playing it on January 27th 1996, but a day later that was all sorted, so today marks 30 years since I hit the virtual hardwood in NBA Jam Tournament Edition for the first time.

Needless to say, as one of the earliest titles that turned my interest in basketball and basketball gaming into full-blown fandom – some might say obsession – NBA Jam Tournament Edition is an all-time nostalgic favourite. It certainly helps that just like the original NBA Jam, it still holds up superbly three decades later. Of course, even if I wasn’t able to enjoy it today, it’d still be a special part of my history with the virtual hardwood and real hoops alike. As such, I’ll never pass up the opportunity to reflect on it, especially on a milestone anniversary! 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 going back to NBA Live 95 to trade players and create jersey swaps that represent future stints.

If you played either of the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95 back in the day, you’ll know that roster customisation is extremely limited. We can only trade players in Season mode, and even then, only the five starters for each team are available to swap. This is because the game only includes portraits for the starters, so any trade that placed a bench player in the starting lineup would result in an inconsistency in the presentation. For the same reason, we can’t change our starters prior to the pre-game introductions, though we can actually pause and substitute them just before tip-off.

On the bright side, whenever we make trades involving the starters, their jerseys will be changed to reflect their new team. Whereas the PC version used (for the time) high resolution Media Day headshots and thus had static portraits, the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95 placed player heads on an assortment of matching shoulders. Not only did this save space on the cartridge, but it facilitates jersey swaps whenever a trade is made. To that point, I’ve made jersey swaps in NBA Live 95 for the Super Nintendo to represent several notable future stints. 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 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.

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 revisiting the 16-bit version of NBA Live 96 – with a focus on the SNES release – and seeing if it can be updated for 1996.

Thirty years ago, the 1995-96 NBA season was in its early stages. It turned out to be one of the most iconic campaigns in league history, with the Chicago Bulls becoming the first team to win 70 games on route to their fourth championship of the decade. However, months earlier the season had been in jeopardy, owing to the lockout of 1995. That lockout is often overlooked as a new collective bargaining agreement was ultimately reached well in time to avoid losing any games. However, it led to various 1996 season video games launching with outdated rosters.

This includes the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versions of NBA Live 96. While the PC and PlayStation versions were released later and thus weren’t affected by the lockout, the 16-bit versions had to ship with 1995 season rosters. This also led to that version including the Expansion Draft for the Vancouver Grizzlies and Toronto Raptors, as well as a bevy of unlockable players. With these features, as well as the addition of roster customisation outside Season mode, is it possible to properly update 16-bit NBA Live 96 for the 1996 season? 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 basketball gaming on the Nintendo Entertainment system, aka the NES.

Saturday will mark forty years since Nintendo launched the NES in select test markets in the United States, some two years after the Famicom debuted in Japan. Over the next few years, it launched in Europe, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, and other regions, going on to sell 61.9 million units worldwide. Support for the NES was officially discontinued thirty years ago in North America, Europe, and Australia, but actually continued in Japan until 2003. Since then, its library has been re-released digitally and via the NES Classic Edition, and of course, unofficially emulated.

Coming in the wake of the infamous Video Game Crash of 1983, the NES ended up bringing us some iconic games and franchises: Super Mario, The Legend of Zelda, and Metroid, just to name the biggest first party properties. There were many other classics from the likes of Capcom, Konami, and other developers that became titans of gaming. However, the NES isn’t usually remembered for having a great selection of basketball titles. With that being said, there are some decent ones that, if nothing else, paved the way for better games to come. 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 suggestions for indie developers who may be interested in making a basketball game.

Even as someone who grew up with video games, I never really dreamed of working in the industry. Way back in 2008, I did receive an offer to join the NBA Live team, an opportunity that I ultimately turned down for personal reasons. Of course, given what was on the horizon with NBA Elite 11, there’s a very good chance that I’d have been back in Australia and running the NLSC again within a couple of years anyway! In any case, even though I remain passionate about video games, creating one isn’t my calling. It’s a fanciful thought, but it is indeed a fantasy more than a dream.

If nothing else, I simply don’t have the skills and knowhow to create a game, and I somehow doubt that a major studio will randomly offer me creative control over a project of my choosing! When it comes to video games, I’m a consumer, critic, and content creator, and that’s absolutely fine by me. With that being said, I still have some ideas about games that I’d like to see, in particular basketball titles. Obviously that includes new NBA Live, NBA Jam, and NBA Street releases, but the indie scene also has a ton of potential. To that end, I’d like to throw out a few ideas! If you’re an indie developer who is considering creating a basketball video game, may I suggest…

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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 Tecmo Super NBA Basketball, primarily focusing on the Super Nintendo version.

Despite being old enough to have played it when it was new – or at the very least, recent – Tecmo Super NBA Basketball is another classic hoops title that I didn’t play until years later. As you may know from our podcast and my previous articles, I didn’t become a hardcore basketball fan and gamer until the mid 90s. This means that my introduction to the virtual hardwood was through games such as NBA Live 95, NBA Live 96, and NBA Jam Tournament Edition, rather than the likes of Double Dribble, Lakers vs. Celtics, Bulls vs. Blazers, and of course, Tecmo Super NBA Basketball.

I’ll admit that this made it difficult to truly appreciate those games the first time I played them. After all, they felt like inferior versions of games that I was actually nostalgic for! I respected their place in the history of the genre, but it was tough to get into them. They were intriguing though, and over the years, I’ve given those classics another chance. This has led to some fun retro gaming sessions where I’ve come to see why they’re so beloved, and discover aspects that were ahead of their time. That includes Tecmo Super NBA Basketball, so 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 iconic point after a dunk in NBA Live 95.

The National Basketball Association is extremely image-conscious to say the least! Throughout the years, they’ve tried to curb behaviour by players and coaches that may harm their reputation, including taking a zero-tolerance approach to complaints to the referees after a whistle. Of course, in practice, this has usually just meant that their favoured stars still get to have their say, while role players are assessed a technical foul for rolling their eyes! The NBA has also discouraged taunting, which is why the late Dikembe Mutombo had to make a point of wagging his finger towards the crowd.

Unsurprisingly – and honestly, quite fairly – the NBA retains control over how it is portrayed in licensed products, including video games. This means that we won’t see unsportsmanlike technical fouls, brawls, or anything else the league doesn’t want to spotlight, represented on the virtual hardwood. Therefore, it’s funny to think that a blatant display of taunting was once prominently featured in an NBA video game! That is of course the point after throwing down a dunk in NBA Live 95, something that long-time hoops gamers nostalgically recall. 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 a response to a question that’s often lobbed at retro basketball gamers: why are you playing that?

I’m sure that at this point, it’s hardly a secret that I’m an enthusiastic advocate for retro basketball gaming. I’ve written a number of articles detailing the fun that I’m having revisiting old favourites and discovering new retro kicks, and explaining why I think it’s worth considering if you’re not enjoying newer titles. To that point, I don’t want to keep harping on points or treading familiar ground in my articles, but the fact of the matter is that there’s still pushback and scorn when it comes to playing older games. Again, “why are you playing that?” is the common refrain here.

Obviously, this is the internet where everyone has an opinion, and believes that their preferences are correct. However, I will entertain the question of why I and others still play older basketball video games, because I’m sure that some people are asking that in good faith. Considering all of the technological advances that have been made over generations of basketball games, not to mention the fact there’s a new NBA season every year, I’m sure it is quite puzzling that some of us do choose to play games with outdated graphics, simpler mechanics, and old rosters. Nostalgia is a major factor, but there’s more to it than that, and the stigma against retro basketball gaming is insulting.

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