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!

1. Limitations on Trading in NBA Live 95 (16-Bit)

While the 16-bit version of NBA Live 95 is an undisputed classic that served as an introduction to sim basketball gaming for many of us long-time virtual hoopers, it does have its limitations. Perhaps the most frustrating of those limitations – at least as a content creator all these years later – is the inability to customise the rosters outside of Season mode. Not only that, but even within Season mode, we’re extremely limited in what we can customise. The only players that we can trade are starters, and to that point, it’s impossible to change the starting lineups. Considering that NBA Live 96 16-bit added deeper roster customisation, it clearly wasn’t impossible to implement.

Upon reflection though, there’s a very sensible explanation for those limitations. Each starter in NBA Live 95 has a portrait; essentially a cut-out of their face that’s placed on matching shoulders wearing the team’s jersey, which can change if they’re traded. Bench players don’t have portraits, and instead their jerseys are displayed if they’re the Player of the Half/Game. With fewer textures, NBA Live 95 could thus fit on a 16-bit cartridge. Of course, it also meant that bench players can’t be moved into the starting five, since they have no portrait to display during introductions. Remove the portraits for all players – as NBA Live 96 did – and there’s no need to limit who can be traded.

2. Number of Teams in Old Franchise Modes

These days we’re accustomed to franchise modes in NBA 2K that account for league expansion, and in the case of MyNBA, custom leagues that have fewer than 30 teams. It took several years for franchise modes to allow a non-standard number of teams, making the option for such customisation a Wishlist staple. As it turns out, there’s a sensible and frankly quite obvious explanation for those limitations, but it wasn’t until Leftos joined us for an interview on the NLSC Podcast that we broached the topic. To be blunt, it underscored that while we may be very familiar with basketball games and great on the sticks, our knowledge of game and software development does have gaps.

Basically, all of the systems in franchise modes – player movement logic, the Draft Lottery, schedule generation, league organisation and formats, etc – are designed to work with the current number of NBA teams. After all, those modes are replicating the real NBA! Accounting for a non-standard number of teams required an overhaul of all of that intertwined code to ensure that nothing went awry. As I’ve said before, coding isn’t like creating or editing a Word document; you can’t just keep adding to the end of it, or easily change things around, without causing problems. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that deeper league customisation took a while to implement.

3. Lack of Sliders in MyCAREER & MyTEAM

Now, I would hope that it’s clear at this point that I don’t support greedy practices in modes like MyCAREER and MyTEAM, and that I’m also in favour of being able to customise the gameplay experience on the virtual hardwood. With that being said, I also recognise that conceptually speaking, some modes don’t lend themselves to the same level of customisation as others. That doesn’t mean I don’t understand or share the frustration with the situation, though. As much fun as MyCAREER and MyTEAM can be – more so before pushy microtransactions really took over – limitations such as the inability to adjust gameplay sliders can lead to having far less fun on the sticks.

At the same time, such limitations make sense. It’s easy to see how gamers could cheat the system by tweaking the sliders in order to put up ridiculous numbers to earn in-game currency easier and faster. Aside from spoiling the journey and the overall challenge of those modes, it’d also upset the competitive balance in the online scene. Granted, the greedy pay-to-win/pay-to-enjoy approach messes with balance anyway, and has facilitated designing the game to be intentionally less fun in order to generate bigger profits. Again, I don’t support that, and I hate what it’s done to MyTEAM and MyCAREER, but the need for consistency makes the lack of sliders understandable.

4. Three Team Trade Restrictions in NBA Live 2001

NBA Live 2001 is an interesting game, as it marked the beginning of a transitional era for the series. As we’d find out many years later, the game was completely rebuilt due to a change in programming language, and there was significant turnover in the team from NBA Live 2000. That’s a sensible explanation for many of the issues we had with NBA Live 2001, but when it comes to the three team trade functionality – the first and last time that it’s been implemented in NBA Live – there were limitations based on an intentional choice. Specifically, when putting together a three team trade in Franchise mode, you can’t suggest any swaps between two CPU-controlled clubs.

This was a point of contention for many franchise gamers, who wrote off the function as being useless as a result. When you think about it though, it does make sense. Part of the challenge of franchise modes is that you can only control the rosters of the team (or teams) you have chosen, and the ability to suggest moves between CPU-controlled teams wouldn’t gel with that philosophy. Also, while it may have been possible to implement trade logic that considered the fairness of user-proposed swaps between CPU teams, given the other challenges during development, they likely couldn’t get it done that year. Again, these are the roadblocks that we gamers often don’t consider.

5. No Steal Button in Early NBA Lives on PC

I love when my research for a feature leads me to even more interesting information than I had anticipated! When I profiled the history of keyboard controls in basketball video games, I found it was impossible to talk about that without also diving into the history of PC joysticks and gamepads. This meant talking about the DA-15 game port that preceded USB for such devices. The game port supported inputs for four buttons, which facilitated two two-button joysticks connected via a splitter cable, or one four-button controller such as the Gravis Gamepad. Knowing these technical specs leaves us with a sensible explanation for the lack of a steal button in NBA Live 95-97 on PC.

If you’re using the keyboard or a four-button gamepad in those games, you can assign three controls: shoot/jump, pass/switch, and turbo. However, two of the buttons will be designated as belonging to Joystick 2. If you’re using two joysticks, they’ll only be able to assign two buttons each. Without a third and fourth button for turbo and steal controls, the solution was to allow full stick movement for sprinting, and have players automatically swipe at the ball when positioned close to a ball handler. In the name of fairness, keyboard users couldn’t assign a manual steal control either. Windows-only releases and USB gamepads alleviated these limitations in NBA Live 98 PC onwards.

What’s your take on these sensible explanations for limitations in basketball video games over the years? What are some other explanations that immediately clicked for you as soon as you heard them, or they came to mind upon reflection? Have your say in the comments, and as always, feel free to take the discussion to the NLSC Forum! That’s all for this week, so thanks for checking in, have a great weekend, and please join me again next Friday for another Five.

The post The Friday Five: 5 Limitations With A Sensible Explanation appeared first on NLSC.