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 frustrating aspects of old school season modes.

So, I’ve already covered why old school season modes in NBA Live and other early titles were so much fun, and I stand by that. They were the pinnacle of campaign play at the time, and if you’re a keen retro gamer who doesn’t mind a simpler experience, I highly recommend beginning a season in an old favourite today! With that being said, once those modes were fleshed out with some basic staples, it took a while before the next big innovation. We certainly recognised the drawbacks and limitations, and we dreamed of modes that lasted longer and represented the NBA in greater detail.

Thankfully, video game developers had the same vision, which led to the introduction of franchise and single player career modes. Interestingly, old school season modes stuck around as a legacy option in games with franchise modes, such as NBA Live and NBA 2K. It also remained the flagship mode in titles that were lagging behind the two brand leaders. Although it didn’t hurt to keep them in games – indeed, I believe there’s value in offering a streamlined option – it was painfully obvious how primitive they now were! Once again though, we already had our criticisms before then. With that in mind, here are five ways that old school season modes could be frustrating.

1. One-And-Done

Not everyone is keen on multi-season play, and that’s understandable. As I noted in my previous article, completing a single season before the next year’s title comes out is challenging enough, especially without simulating any games. Even if you don’t buy a new game every year – and certainly a lot of people stuck with one or two hoops titles back then – there was plenty of fun to be had with a single season. The idea of being able to progress through multiple seasons was around long before games finally implemented franchise mode, though. We appreciated the depth of old school season modes and enjoyed playing through them, but we wished the journey could continue.

Because we were – and I say this with pride and affection – geeky and imaginative, mods and other workarounds gave us makeshift methods of playing multiple seasons. NBA Live 96 PC’s Season mode even had a roster export function, basically allowing you to start over with whatever changes you’d made during the course of a campaign. It wasn’t true multi-season play though, as we’d be starting over in the same year with the same schedule, with no cumulative statistics or results. It was the best we could do until the next big innovation in basketball gaming, which finally came along in NBA Live 2000 PC. Until then, there was some frustration with season mode’s stagnation.

2. Lack of Depth

While I listed the simplicity of old school season modes as a positive in my previous article, it’s undoubtedly a drawback as well. There’s a fun time to be had when you just focus on the virtual basketball, playing through the schedule and winning games on route to an NBA Championship. It is nice to have that extra depth, though. From the need to negotiate trades and free agent signings while navigating the salary cap, to training sessions and some of the additional off-court management tasks, franchise modes have given us so much more to do. Sure, it was fun to imagine some of those things in old school season modes, but it’s even better when they’re tangible features!

Simply put, there’s a reason that our early Wishlists suggested ideas that eventually became staples of franchise play. As much as we’d enjoyed season mode for many years as that point, by the late 90s, we definitely wanted more out of basketball video games. Again, I believe that old school season modes can still be fun, though they benefit from nostalgia and not being the only option we have. Of course, not all old school games had well-designed season modes – more on that in a moment – and even NBA Live 95 16-bit didn’t allow bench players to be traded, limiting what we could do. The best modes were great for their time, but at a certain point, we desired more.

3. A Static League

This ties into the aforementioned lack of depth, but even in old school season modes where we had ample options and the ability to customise the rosters, the league was static. No trades or signings would occur unless we made them, and the earliest modes didn’t have multiple-game injuries. As such, unless you chose to intervene, apart from the statistics and standings, the league would look the same at the end of the year as it had on opening night. That may be preferable for some gamers of course, and when we could manage the entire league’s rosters, there were plenty of fun things we could do. Nevertheless, old school season play feels much less “alive” than franchise modes.

The All-Star Game is another great example of how old school season modes felt static. As awesome as it was when the All-Star Game was represented on the virtual NBA calendar, more often than not, the default All-Star squads were used rather than new selections being made based on in-season performance. Sure, it was fun being able to use our imaginations and make changes as desired, but ultimately we wanted gameplay events to have a bigger impact on the virtual league. If you didn’t grow up playing those old school season modes, it may be tough to appreciate what a huge innovation it was for injuries to matter, moves to occur, and the league to feel alive.

4. Poor Sim Engine Logic

I should note that this isn’t a staple of all old school season modes. Early NBA Live games – and indeed, the NBA Playoffs games before them – had impressive attention to detail when it came to player performance, both on the virtual hardwood and in simulation. The results weren’t perfect, but if you go back and simulate through a season in old school NBA Live titles, the league leaders and stats in general will be surprisingly and pleasingly realistic! The top teams also tend to win more often, as they should. However, this wasn’t universally the case. There are plenty of old games where the simulated stats and results are wildly inaccurate and downright illogical.

I’m not talking about the occasional upset or otherwise weird result. In some games, players who never averaged more than 15 ppg are topping the league with around 30. Other statistical leaders will likewise demonstrate a lack of realism, despite generally accurate player ratings. The standings will also be highly unlikely, and lowly teams that shouldn’t even make the postseason are somehow winning virtual championships in almost every simulation. If there were injuries, the duration was decided at random, and was thus often at odds with the severity. Again, NBA Live often had good sim engine logic, but season modes in many old school games lacked attention to detail.

5. Not Every Game Did Them Right

Of course, it wasn’t just the sim logic that season modes in several old school games didn’t get right. It’s impossible to say without sounding like the NBA Live fanboy that I was as a kid, but even looking back with more of an open mind today, NBA Live’s competitors during its golden age really should’ve copied what EA Sports were doing! I’m not saying that NBA Live’s season modes were perfect, and they obviously had limitations that persisted until the development of Franchise. However, EA had had several years to establish an intuitive and effective approach to the basic staples of season play. When other games tried to do things differently, it frequently went awry.

For example, Kobe Bryant in NBA Courtside features only one season save which uses any changes to the default roster. Fox Sports NBA Basketball 2000 allows you to import rosters into season play; a great idea in theory, but it basically means that you can reset the entire league at any point! NBA in the Zone 2 doesn’t include trades or detailed stat tracking, despite incorporating more sim elements than its predecessor. In short, as primitive as NBA Live’s season modes may seem nowadays, those other old school games were even more barebones, or oddly-designed. Many gamers enjoyed them regardless, but a lot of old school season modes were clunky, even for the time.

Do you recall these frustrations in old school season modes? Which classic games had the best and worst season play in your view? 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 Frustrating Aspects of Old School Season Modes appeared first on NLSC.