Keeping Those NBA Dreams Alive

[intric8]

Back in late September when we went to PRGE, I bought my son two XBOX One NBA games (for just a few bucks!). This past year he has really gotten into basketball and, according to him, none of the games for his XBOX S are any good. “They’re just boring money grabs,” he’ll say. According to Graham, the best modern NBA games were on the previous generation One model. In 2021, a good friend of mine gave us his One soon after he upgraded to an X. That machine has been gathering dust ever since I upgraded my son to an S for Christmas a few years ago. But after picking up NBA 2K16 and 2K20 disks for pennies on the dollar at PRGE (seriously, 2k16 was only $5), he’s been playing them ever since. And he believes the 2K16 game hits the sweet spot.

Anyway, we drove out to our cabin last night, which is on the Washington peninsula with a view of Puget Sound, to decompress after a long a stressful week. We have to take a ferry boat to an island, then drive across that island to a bridge that connects us to the peninsula. Without heavy traffic it’s about a 1.5 hour commute door to door. If we don’t plan it well it can creep up to two hours but it’s a gorgeous drive either way. Realistically this’ll probably be the last trip to the cabin we make this year as the weather starts to get colder.

As we’re unpacking everything, Graham realizes that he somehow forgot to bring the Xbox One’s brick PSU. I could see the look on his face he was already trying to process the mild depression. Last month when we were out here I decided to bring my beautiful MiSTer console and make it a permanent part of the cabin experience mainly so I didn’t have to drag stuff back and forth all of the time. From a console gaming and even a C64 perspective, it allows me to keep my retro passion going on full throttle without having to lug crates of crap every time we want to spend the weekend out there.

I fired it up and went to the SNES option. Lo and behold there are over half a dozen fantastic NBA options ready to go. After a few minutes of remapping buttons suddenly things were feeling pretty good!

SNES FTW

Deep down I know my son looks down on pixelated gaming to some degree. So this morning I downloaded NBA Live 2000 for Playstation 1, and NBA Hangtime for N64.

Does anyone here like to play NBA games? What are your favorites we should check out? I can also install games from the Sega 32x, CD, Genesis and Saturn (looking forward to the day the Dreamcast makes the leap - if that's even realistic), Neo Geo and NEX Turbographx-16.

[intric8]

I got NBA Hangtime for the Nintendo 64 loaded on the Mister and it's fantastic. I've never played it before (I was never into basketball games to be honest). But this licensed goofy game is a ton of fun. Really nice graphics, too. Great to see the Seattle Supersonics with Shawn Kemp again, too, and he's great in this game.

Graham was getting into it, too. The N64 really can push some pretty pixels.

Sonics!

But then there was a knock on our door. I ran upstairs to discover Amazon had dropped off a replacement PSU brick for the Xbox One. With the snap of my fingers, Graham had moved to the "real" entertainment room.

And I have to say, the difference is shocking. The level of realism for a game from 2015/16 with Kevin Harlan's real voice doing the play-by-play is nuts. According to Graham, the graphics for this game was actually better back then than it is now, where it apparently has "regressed."

Regardless, it is pretty cool to see Kobe again.

Hill in the house, y'all! ;)