Wayback Wednesday: Magic’s BIG Moment in NBA Live 14

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 Magic Johnson’s BIG Moment in NBA Live 14.

The eighth generation was a rough and ultimately unsuccessful attempted comeback for the NBA Live series. At the same time, those releases also demonstrated flashes of brilliance and meritorious ideas that were worthy of far better games. Appropriately, NBA Live 14 exemplifies the duality of the generation of games it tipped off, being notably flawed while also featuring some excellent concepts. That includes a couple of modes that were powered by live service content and EA Sports’ partnership with Synergy Sports, namely NBA Rewind and BIG Moments.

I ended up quite enjoying BIG Moments in NBA Live 14. Granted, that was in large part due to their brevity which allowed me to avoid becoming too bothered by all of the gameplay flaws, but I genuinely had fun with them, too! I was also pleasantly surprised to see a couple of historical BIG Moments come through, including games for Dominique Wilkins and Magic Johnson. However, Magic Johnson’s BIG Moment – which was added eleven years ago today – also showed that NBA Live 14 definitely wasn’t the best game for such a cool idea. Let’s take a look back…way back…

For those who need a refresher on what BIG Moments was, the mode featured single game challenges based on real NBA games. NBA Live 14 launched with a handful of challenges from 2013 to get us going, and as noteworthy games and performances occurred during the 2014 season, we’d be able to replay them with the appropriate lineups and player ratings, powered by Synergy. This included matching a player or team’s statistical performance, replicating a great defensive effort or huge comeback victory, or my favourite, hitting a game-winning shot. Our performance was graded and ranked on leaderboards, not unlike the challenges we now see in MyTEAM.

Even though NBA Live 14 wasn’t everything I’d hoped it would be – to put it mildly – I do remember watching exciting performances and game-winners during the 2014 season, and looking forward to seeing them show up as a BIG Moment. Of course, it wasn’t the first time basketball games boasted live service content. NBA Live 10 had Dynamic Season. NBA Today is a long-time staple of NBA 2K, while NBA Inside Drive 2000 offered a similar feature way back in 1999. Sony’s NBA series on the PS3 included NBA Replay – a mode updated with new challenges all season – some seven years earlier. Nevertheless, BIG Moments was well-done, and had plenty of potential.

Obviously, that included the ability to feature historical challenges. NBA Live 14 arguably hinted at that possibility from launch, when it provided challenges from the recent past to tide us over until the live service content began to flow in. However, given that the game didn’t utilise Legends outside of Ultimate Team, it was surprising when Dominique Wilkins and Magic Johnson received BIG Moments! It certainly wasn’t unwelcome though, as it celebrated NBA history and made better use of the Legends that EA Sports had licensed. It didn’t quite compare to the historical content in NBA 2K14, but it was better than letting the Legends languish in Ultimate Team.

As I noted, Magic’s BIG Moment in NBA Live 14 – “Classic Magic” – was added on March 26th, 2014. The date was no coincidence, as it marked the 25th anniversary of Magic Johnson tallying a triple-double with 34 points, 18 assists, and 10 rebounds – and hitting the game-winning shot – in a 118-116 Lakers victory over the Suns on Easter Sunday in 1989. Outside of one of his NBA Finals showdowns with Larry Bird and the Celtics, it’s an ideal performance to turn into a challenge in a basketball game! “Classic Magic” is also the longest BIG Moments challenge, as it’s a full game on 12-minute quarters. Most challenges were just a few seconds to two quarters in length.

This was necessary of course, as it would be ridiculously challenging – indeed, pretty close to impossible – to re-create Magic’s triple-double on shorter quarters. Well, the points and assists aren’t unthinkable, but snaring 18 boards is a tall order that requires some good luck in regulation time, let alone in an abbreviated game! Beginning the challenge in the fourth quarter with most of the stats accounted for also wouldn’t be very satisfying in my opinion. It’s a shame to lose the game-winning shot which was arguably the bigger story of the night – Magic did tally some more impressive triple-doubles than that one – but realistically, that would need to be its own BIG Moment.

Unfortunately, Magic’s BIG Moment was a better idea in theory, or at least one that would’ve been more appealing to play in a game other than NBA Live 14. Now, I’m no stranger to finding enjoyment in flawed games. I’ve been able to make the best of some of the more contentious releases in the NBA Live series, and Bart vs. the Space Mutants is a nostalgic favourite despite being…well, largely terrible! A full-length game of NBA Live 14 is a daunting prospect though, especially when it involves a challenge that can very easily be failed, forcing you to replay it all over again. I simply didn’t have the patience to try my luck at re-creating some “Classic Magic”!

After all, at least one failed attempt was a distinct possibility, no matter how good you are on the sticks. In a title with better gameplay, replicating or besting Magic’s triple-double down to the last statistic would be quite difficult, but likely still feasible. With the clunky mechanics in NBA Live 14 however, it would require even more luck than usual. A tough challenge in a title with strong gameplay will encourage you to try and try again, but when you’re fighting the game’s mechanics every step of the way, one failed attempt may be all that you can stomach! It also doesn’t help that we were stuck with an accelerated clock in all of the longer BIG Moments games in NBA Live 14.

On top of that, historical BIG Moments in NBA Live 14 were far from authentic. The featured Legend was the only historical player in the challenge, meaning they were awkwardly shoved into a lineup with their team’s 2014 squad, facing contemporary players as their opponents. In other words, you were tasked to a tally a triple-double with Magic Johnson on a Lakers squad featuring Jodie Meeks, Nick Young, Steve Blake, and Jordan Hill – from memory, Kobe Bryant remained inactive – against a Suns team comprised of Goran Dragic, Gerald Green, P.J. Tucker, and Channing Frye. The teams wouldn’t even wear era-appropriate throwbacks for the occasion!

Dominique Wilkins’ game was no different. He was in the lineup in place of DeMarre Carroll, sporting an Atlanta Hawks jersey that he never wore, going up against players from another generation. As pleasantly surprising as it was to see those two historical BIG Moments added in NBA Live 14, they did unfortunately spotlight the weakness of its retro content, from classic players to throwback jerseys. Although “Classic Magic” admittedly didn’t promise authentic rosters and team branding anywhere in its description – and I for one wasn’t expecting to see either – the concept is undeniably less exciting without those details. It’s a stretch to even call it a minimalist throwback.

With that being said, I’m not suggesting that the developers shouldn’t have attempted to add some historical challenges to BIG Moments in NBA Live 14. Yes, it does feel a bit underwhelming when compared to the depth of NBA 2K’s historical content, but I’d rather that a game shows initiative and tries to make the most of what it has. Magic and Nique’s BIG Moments were something different that made use of a couple of the Legends that EA Sports had managed to license for NBA Live 14, they celebrated NBA history, and they certainly didn’t cause any harm or ruin the game in any way. At worst, they were an intriguing idea that was somewhat disappointing in execution.

Mind you, it’s also an example of how NBA Live 14 was doing the bare minimum, a criticism that you could level at the series in general beginning with NBA Live 06 for Xbox 360. On one hand, it’s better than nothing and I can appreciate the effort, but on the other hand, it was the result of neglecting historical content for far too long. The array of Legends and retro jerseys that were featured in NBA Live games from the early 2000s had diminished and disappeared, though throwbacks eventually returned in NBA Live 10. Sadly, Dynasty mode had also stagnated by NBA Live 14, while staples such as roster editing and a standalone Playoffs mode were missing entirely.

In that respect, the shallowness of Magic’s BIG Moment and other shortcomings with the historical content in NBA Live 14 and beyond are a symptom of a much bigger problem. The barebones nature of NBA Live 06 for Xbox 360, the huge backwards step with NBA Live 07, and of course the utter debacle that was NBA Elite 11, left the series scrambling to catch up to where it needed to be in terms of both quality and depth. It’s not that NBA Live hasn’t featured some great ideas these last twenty years, but they haven’t been fleshed out or properly followed up on, or they’ve simply been overshadowed by poor gameplay and other issues, making them harder to appreciate.

Still, while it could’ve been done better and underscores NBA Live’s recurring issue of unfulfilled potential, it was cool to see Magic’s BIG Moment land in NBA Live 14. We hadn’t been promised any historical content in that mode, so as barebones as it may have been, it was still novel. Moreover, it celebrated NBA history genuinely and unreservedly; a concept that has sadly gone out of vogue. It’s no Jordan Challenge or NBA’s Greatest, and it’s not in a release that even hardcore NBA Live fans were keen to play, but it was a nice idea all the same. I do wish I’d given it a shot, though with all of NBA Live 14’s flaws, it truly would’ve taken some Classic Magic to pull it off!

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