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Dumb Mondays

Dumb Mondays: Should Bad Calls Be In Basketball Video Games?

This is Dumb Mondays, tipping off the workweek with silly facts, opinions, or predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This was originally JaoSming’s feature, but since he’s now at Visual Concepts and hard at work on 2KTV, I’ll be writing a few articles in his place. A new Monday feature may also be coming soon, so stay tuned!

If there’s one thing that sports fans can agree on, it’s that the referees are dumb. It’s not exactly a fair statement of course, as referees often have to make difficult calls and split-second decisions, with limited use of instant replay. Since no one is perfect, “dumb” is a harsh assessment of human error that unfortunately can occur at the worst possible time. Still, when a bad call goes against our favourite team, we’ll curse out the refs, calling them blind, stupid, and biased.

Bottom line, bad calls are like injuries; they’re an unfortunate part of the game that we hope not to see, but are bound to happen at some point. Therefore, I ask the question: since we want to see basketball video games continually become more and more realistic, would it be a dumb idea for them to include bad calls?

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Dumb Mondays: NBA Live 2003 PC Dev Console Fun

This is Dumb Mondays, tipping off the workweek with silly facts, opinions, or predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This was originally JaoSming’s feature, but since he’s now at Visual Concepts and hard at work on 2KTV, I’ll be writing a few articles in his place. A new Monday feature may also be coming soon, so stay tuned!

Did you know? The PC versions of NBA Live 2003, NBA Live 2004, and a few other games in the series featured a developer console that was disabled by default. It’s true; with a quick modification of a configuration file, the console can be re-enabled and used to mess around with the game. It has limited uses compared to, say, a first person shooter, and to that end, some people might be inclined to call the whole thing dumb. But hey, this is Dumb Mondays, so let’s have some fun!

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Dumb Mondays: MyCAREER Hypocrisy

This is Dumb Mondays, tipping off the workweek with silly facts, opinions, or predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This is JaoSming’s feature, but he’s a little short on time and availability at the moment, so I’m filling in for him.

If you’re a regular listener of the NLSC Podcast – and you absolutely should be! – then you’ve probably heard me complain on multiple occasions about the scripted approach to MyCAREER in NBA 2K14 on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. That’s just a matter of personal taste, but I do have another gripe that I’m sure quite a few people will agree with. In short, the grading logic in MyCAREER could stand to be tweaked, as it seems to be geared more towards punishing mistakes than rewarding good play.

And frankly, it’s making a filthy hypocrite out of me.

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No Dumb Monday or Beat Jao This Week

It is Dumb Monday, and today you get a dumb excuse for me being lazy despite having more free time to write articles and come up with challenges. Actually, I do not have a good excuse for not writing the article or recording a new challenge attempt. If you want to use this time to go back and attempt older, or last week’s, challenges, I may or may not end up scoring them for the overall leaderboard of Beat Jao.

Click to check out all the Dumb Monday articles and Beat Jao challenges, or reflect on the Tuesday Triple if you’d like. We will see what next week brings before I promise a new challenge or article.

Dumb Monday: Feeling Forced to Patch

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb thought of mine and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

We are only getting closer to NBA 2K15’s release. October 7th will bring many of us primarily PC-based users into the ‘next generation’ of basketball video games and will undoubtedly change the landscape of PC modding for NBA 2K games. I still foresee only two major directions modding and NBA 2K15 can go. Either modding will be possible with some new (or maybe old!) tools, or impossible because of VC being a part of the picture. So with this imminent shift coming to our community I have been feeling a bit forced to clear out my patching bucket list. As I have said many times before, we should only patch if it is fun for ourselves, but lately I have been making an exception to that rule.

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Dumb Monday: Get Informed and Be Patient, Please

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb pet peeve of mine and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

I said it before and I will say it many more times before and after October 7th, it, has, happened! A fully featured PlayStation 4/Xbox One port of NBA 2K15 will be released on PC. Typing that still feels like a lie or some kind of sick rib on the PC community, based entirely on our speculative reasons behind the preceding PC ports. So rather than reflecting on the past to decipher the meaning behind 2K’s decision, I just want to plead with all PC NBA 2K players to keep that same patience I have been preaching all along when it comes to upgrading your computer for NBA 2K15.

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Dumb Monday: MyDREAM

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb opinion of mine and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

In case you missed it, MyLEAGUE for the next gen versions of NBA 2K15 was detailed this week. I think Steve over at OperationSports summed it up best by calling it Association “on steroids”. Essentially MyLEAGUE is an NBA sandbox. We can customize many aspects to our liking with no VC to spend or objectives to meet other than our own. On top of the customization features we, for the first time, get to change core AI aspects of mode with trades and other logic. And on top of that we get new features like the detailed “injuries 2.0” and gameplans, which will also affect MyGM. But at its core there is that customization. That customization is why I may as well call this mode MyDREAM.

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Dumb Mondays: My Modding Now Versus 2007

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb something of mine and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

One more week. Not even one more week, days and hours can measure the time between me typing this and the first substantial information drop on NBA 2K15 (and maybe even NBA Live 15 if they keep dueling). Believe me when I say that NBA Live 15’s ball looks amazing, but the endless speculation during this time of year is just that, endless. So this week I finally got to play in my sandbox that is NBA 2K14 and brought along my still shiny new toy RED MC. I put my head down and created. It was fun, but I realized halfway through my project that I was doing something very similar to what I did with NBA Live 07, but this time it look a lot less time.

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Dumb Mondays: Modding Wishlist Countdown

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a countdown on modding and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

Yes, the Tuesday Triple is still retired. Thankfully the Dumb Monday umbrella still allows me to rattle off an old fashioned countdown every once in a while, and I have a dumb one for you today. Thanks to the new versions of RED MC we can now do amazing things with NBA 2K on PC that have never been done before for that series. Unfortunately there are still a few things that I would like to accomplish either with RED MC, or through good old fashion hex editing or memory editing. So here are a few things I would love to see the community be able to edit in NBA 2K PC, in Tuesday Triple format, enjoy!.

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Dumb Mondays: We Need a Generic Basketball Game

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb rant and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

It is never too late to publish a wishlist article and this is something I have been meaning to get off my chest. We, the basketball video game playing community, need a gameplay-focused alternative to the yearly NBA games. It can be from some other company, an indie game, or from EA or 2K themselves using their NBA engine, but we need some kind of customizable sandbox based around this sport. All that we do with the PC versions of the NBA games is great, but we need something designed to be customized, rather than something simply made more customizable than intended.

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Dumb Mondays: Dumb Mod Ideas from the Past

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb pet peeve of mine and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

If you have watched any of my modding tutorial videos on YouTube, you may have noticed some txt files on my desktop that never seem to ever get deleted. In a desperate move to try and stay organized, I decided txt files would be the method of choice for me to keep track of things I needed to get done. I also keep a few for different mod ideas for the PC NBA games that we all play and enjoy for hours on end. So allow me to share with you the many many mods that never got made (and remember, everything I do is ‘open source’ so if you see an idea you like, by all means make it).

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No Dumb Monday or Tuesday Triple This Week

Due to dumb excuses (watching Super Mario World speedruns instead of writing papers), I was unable to make time to write my weekly articles. I was thinking of doing a late release but no.

Since I did spend too much time watching speedruns (thank you for the introduction SGDQ), I will drop off one of the Dumb Facts I never got to. Super Mario, Luigi, and Princess Peach were in NBA Street V3 for GameCube. Seriously, that a pretty sweet cameo for the NBA Street series.

Other than that, I don’t have much for you all this week. As we’ve said in the podcast, things have been expectedly quiet and the topics to write about have been lacking. So maybe I will change things up a bit for The Tuesday Triple for the summer since my attempt to overthrow the king that is The Friday Five has failed. Enjoy your week!

Dumb Mondays: That’s Not NBA 2K15, You Liar

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb pet peeve of mine and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

It, is, TIME. We are officially under 100 days until October 7th, the release date of NBA Live 15 and NBA 2K15. 2K and EA are just beginning their hype train for the Summer. The speculation is already running wild and for the next few months that will only increase as we are drip-fed information about the latest and greatest versions of our annual basketball videogames. We have already seen a few websites take the role of click-bait claiming that the PC version of NBA 2K15 will or will be a next gen port, but a yearly violation is YouTubers mislabeling the current game as the new one.

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Dumb Mondays: Three Idiots Play Tag

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing the dumbest thing that the Dumb Mondays series has ever seen, and I previously made predictions in this feature so that’s saying something.

After recording the podcast last week we decided to play some video games together. Mortal Kombat and NBA 2K14 PC could not handle the greatness that is Joel Anthony transcontinental lag so we played something that we knew could mask any apparent lag, NBA 2K14 on PlayStation 4. If you are a regular listener to the podcast you know I constantly joke about playing tag in NBA 2K14’s The Park, I think once I picked my jaw up off the floor after its announcement I immediately blurted out that gem. Well, last week we did it. I present to you Andrew, Arcane also known as Ben, and J2theAO JaoSming aka Jon playing tag, in The Park, set to Yakety Sax of course. Enjoy, and I am so very sorry.

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Dumb Mondays: Change this Face, Be Happy, Enjoy!

This is Dumb Mondays, starting the workweek off with silly facts or some of my opinions and predictions that you may or may not find interesting. This week I am sharing a dumb opinion and will be looking for and responding to your comments throughout the week.

If you are unfamiliar with the title please watch this video of Ricky Rubio talking to Alexey Shved. It comes off as one of the most genuine and nicest things I have seen during an NBA game, enough to make me smile whenever it is mentioned or I see that clip. That kind of optimism is something that I think we need here at the NLSC. With the confusion surrounding the $60 preorders for NBA 2K15 PC coupled with the speculation that is normal around this time of year, I have been getting this feeling of pessimism in the community. So this week I am going to rant a bit about being happy with what we have, because 6 years ago we went through this before.

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