Tag Archives: Ultimate Basketball

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 things in basketball video games that became retroactive Easter eggs.

Can there be such a thing as retroactive Easter eggs? After all, by definition, Easter eggs in video games and other media are deliberately placed with the intention of being found; even if takes a long time. To that point, there have been many secrets in video games that remained hidden for decades, but they were always present. In that sense, there’s nothing retroactive about them. Of course, when it comes to fictional works, reveals and ret-cons can certainly turn minor details into retroactive Easter eggs by giving them new meaning and importance.

Similarly, future events can re-contextualise content in basketball video games, as well as associated materials such as preview media. When we look back at them with the benefit of hindsight, they become retroactive Easter eggs. Even when they’re not exactly hidden and there’s a straightforward explanation for their presence – and there generally is – they’re now far more exciting to find. And so, if you enjoy revisiting old basketball video games as I do, you’re basically guaranteed to encounter retroactive Easter eggs, from forgotten cameos to amusing coincidences. Indeed, on top of many old favourites holding up superbly, these are great reasons to dust off some classics.

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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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From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #578 of the NLSC Podcast!

It’s been a couple of years, so this week community member Ken (aka Stildo33) makes an overdue return to the show! We chat to Ken about his new business venture bringing competitive gaming to kids, and his experiences schooling the youth on the virtual hardwood. We also get his thoughts on NBA 2K25, including MyNBA Eras and the Eras rosters. Ken also provides an update on his retro season mods for NBA 2K19, and we discuss modding techniques and the importance of attention to detail. He also shares more memories of playing Ultimate Basketball for NES and a couple of other old school favourites, how he stays connected to basketball, and his takes on Payton Pritchard and this year’s Boston Celtics.

Check out battlegamingtruck.com for more info on Ken’s new business!

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 1:12:55 — 50.4MB)

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!

From courtside of the virtual hardwood, it’s Episode #576 of the NLSC Podcast!

Although we mostly play and primarily cover NBA and NCAA licensed basketball video games, there have certainly been some classic releases that lack their high profile branding, as well as real teams and players. This week, we join the community in recalling some of our all-time favourite unlicensed basketball video games. We also name a handful of favourites that only licensed one or two real players, starred fictional characters, or otherwise didn’t have anything to do with the NBA or NCAA. As we discuss, these games inspired us to use our imaginations, created many Virtual Hardwood Legends, and sometimes included impressive features and gameplay mechanics.

Download or play on your mobile device/tablet: CLICK HERE (Running time: 53:42 — 37.2MB)

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 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 countdown of the Top 5 coincidences that we’ve seen in basketball video games.

Coincidences are everywhere in basketball gaming. As Thunder Shaq and Dee4Three pointed out, NBA 2K used very similar phrasing to my Familiar Faces in Strange Places series of Wayback Wednesday articles to describe a themed set in MyTEAM. Of course, there are only so many ways to phrase things, and similar ideas will end up with similar titles and terminology. As this 2015 post about joke stealing explains, the phenomenon of parallel development accounts for many similarities, especially when something is topical or a common point of interest.

Beyond that, a lot of coincidences are fun, owing to the way they seemingly predict the future. We’ve seen coincidences like that occur more than a couple of times in basketball video games over the years. It’s easy to call them predictions in hindsight, while conveniently ignoring a lot of things that aren’t…well, anything! The ones that do look like predictions and foreshadowing are merely coincidences, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable. Today, I’m counting down my picks for the Top 5 coincidences in basketball gaming. There’s some overlap with my previous article on predictions, but there are also some new coincidences that you might find amusing.

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