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.

1. One Season Mode Save

In all fairness, the reason that many old basketball games had only one save slot for their Season modes came down to technical limitations, such as read-only cartridges and discs, and memory cards with a very small amount of storage space. Then again, that’s also making excuses for games whose contemporaries found a way to provide at least a few different save slots via battery backup cartridges, or efficient use of space on memory cards. Even with the limitations of the Nintendo 64, other basketball titles demonstrated that it should’ve been possible for Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside to have more than one save slot. There were limitations, yes, but it was also bad design.

It should be obvious why having just one save slot is one of the prominent mistakes found in early Season modes, but let’s run down the disadvantages. If you want to experiment or try out a different team, you can’t do that and keep the original save. If you had siblings and they wanted to play their own Season with their own team, you were fighting over who got to keep their save (and most likely, who deleted someone else’s). There was no way to make a backup in case of accidental deletion, or some kind of glitch. If a title still only offered a single save slot for its Season mode when its contemporaries commonly provided multiple slots, it was a poorly designed game.

2. Integrated Roster Customisation

Of all the mistakes in old Season modes that I’m covering here today, this one may be the worst. Full NBA Season modes and roster customisation were two of the biggest innovations during the early days of basketball gaming. Sure, it was fun to begin a season with the official NBA rosters as they were when the game was released. It was even better to be able to update the rosters with new transactions and missing players though, or perhaps set up some wild and wacky scenarios, and then start a Season. Additionally, any moves that you made during a Season were self-contained, and didn’t affect the default rosters or other saves. A Season save was its own reality.

At least, that’s how it should ideally work. Some games, particularly those with only one Season save file, utilised a universal roster. Whatever moves you made in the default roster also applied to your Season in progress. That could be fun, but it was also extremely limiting. Other games – Fox Sports NBA Basketball 2000 is one – allowed rosters to be imported into a Season. You can even reset all the trades that have been made within the save file! There are times when you might want to do that, but suffice to say it could get incredibly messy. Self-contained Season saves predated these unusual design choices, so technical limitations couldn’t have been a factor.

3. Terrible Sim Engine Logic

One of the biggest mistakes that older games made in their Season modes was to pay no attention to the simulation engine. This produced results that were unlikely to the point of feeling random, and statistics that didn’t at all reflect what we’d expect to see. Now, it should be acknowledged that realism can be hard to define when it comes to Season and franchise modes, because weird and unexpected things happen during the course of an NBA campaign. Truth is stranger than fiction, as the old saying goes. On top of that, not everyone cared about accuracy and realism. Some people just wanted to play with NBA players, winning virtual championships and defeating their friends.

Plenty of other gamers sought a more realistic experience, and clearly developers had similar goals as the best games did strive to reflect the real NBA as much as possible. This made any games where the sim engine produced ridiculously unrealistic stats and results stand out as inferior products. Seeing a player who never scored more than 15 points per game leading the league in scoring, defensive turnstiles winning Defensive Player of the Year, and basement-dwelling teams making constant underdog Finals runs, tended to detract from the overall experience. The best Season modes were the ones that represented the NBA with a few surprises, rather than bizarre inaccuracies.

4. Limited Roster Management

If I had to name one of the most important basic functions in basketball video games, I’d have to say lineup management. When we pick a team to play with, we need to be able to select who’s on the floor, and who’s available to bring in off the bench. Even in an arcade game like NBA Jam, choosing the duo for your selected team (and who you control, if there’s no Tag Mode) is an important decision. As for sim titles and their Season and franchise modes, we expect to have full control over the rosters. Setting a new starting lineup, moving players in and out of the active roster, and making trades and signings, are all part of the experience. Again, those functions are just expected.

That’s why it’s jarring when you go back to an old game where you can’t change the starting lineup or bench order, as was the case in the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95. You could also only trade starters in that game, which wouldn’t be so bad if you could modify the starting five, but again, you couldn’t. The inability to reorder lineups or even just trade players isn’t uncommon the further back you go with old basketball games. It may now look odd when an old title promotes basic roster management as a key feature, but before it was a staple function, it was actually a selling point! It didn’t take long for EA to remedy this, but it’s one of the few drawbacks of NBA Live 95.

5. No Multi-Game Simulation

This is one of those mistakes that can even be found in the best Season modes in old titles. Again, NBA Live 95 is an example. Its approach to Season play, both in the 16-bit versions and the later PC release, set the bar for other NBA sim games. Sure, it looks primitive now, but at the time it had basically every feature that you could want and feasibly expect…with the exception of being able to simulate multiple games. By that, I mean jumping ahead in the schedule, selecting a date, and simulating all of the games in between. This is now a standard feature in NBA-based modes, whether it’s single season play, multi-season franchise, or the NBA side of a single player career.

There was a time when that wasn’t standard functionality though, and thus simming through an entire Season in some old games was painfully slow. It’s not until you’ve tried to get through 82 games by simulating them one-by-one, with the inevitable delay as the results are generated and displayed, that you realise how something so simple saves so much time. Mistakes like this are rare to find past the mid 90s, when many basic functions that we now take for granted were making their debut in some form. Nevertheless, it’s one of those mistakes/oversights that you’ll notice if you’re a dedicated retro gamer, or just taking a trip down memory lane with an old favourite.

What are some other odd mistakes that you recall from the Season modes of old basketball video games? Did any of the ones that I mentioned ring a bell? Let me know 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 Mistakes Old Games Made in Season Modes appeared first on NLSC.