Monday Tip-Off: Enhancing the Original Rosters
We’re at midcourt, and the ball is about to go up…it’s Monday Tip-Off! Join me as I begin the week here at the NLSC with my opinions and commentary on basketball gaming topics, as well as tales of the fun I’ve been having on the virtual hardwood. This week, I’m tipping things off with some thoughts on mods that are all about enhancing the original rosters.
Our modding community has produced some incredible projects going right back to the 90s. The original NLSC rosters by Tim and Lutz kept games up to date, saving gamers the trouble of doing it themselves and allowing some old favourites to remain current for the people that were still playing them. We’ve also had retro season roster mods for multiple games, including projects that span decades. NBA games have been turned into makeshift college basketball titles, and even revamped with foreign league mods. That’s just a very brief overview of the fantastic work that’s been done!
However, we shouldn’t overlook the value of simpler projects. I’m not just talking about minimalist mods, although I do remain an advocate for them as well. What I’m referring to here are mods that focus on the original rosters and setting of a game. On the surface, they’re not as impressive as a comprehensive current roster update for an older game that people still enjoy, an accurate retro season mod, or a total conversion, but they’re still worthwhile projects. With a handful of old favourites retaining their popularity years later, other classics getting a second look, and an increasing interest in retro basketball gaming, I’d like to see more mods that focus on original rosters.
That doesn’t mean we avoid making any changes at all to the rosters, though I suppose there are potentially projects where that is part of the concept. By original rosters, I’m referring to a mod that doesn’t change the season or league a game is set in. Instead, the focus would be on enhancing and updating the roster, correcting oversights and errors, and adding bonus content such as missing Legends. Such a project could also include unofficial technical fixes and enhancements if we know how to make them, as well as finely-tuned slider settings where applicable. In short, a mod that makes a game as good as it can be, rather than a total conversion to something it never was.
We’ve seen a few of these mods over the years, and I’ve tried my hand at them as well. I ended up calling my mods for NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 “Definitive” rosters; slightly egotistical I’ll admit, but I believe it gets the concept across! In a similar vein, for the last few years PeacemanNOT has been toiling away on his “2K11 Remastered” project for NBA 2K11. There’s a lot more that we can do with NBA 2K11, so his mod also includes improvements to jerseys, logos, and courts, real dornas that 2K couldn’t originally license, and proper faces for players who are missing them in the final official roster updates, on top of fixes to the roster itself.
In other words, it’s an unofficial remaster of NBA 2K11, much as I strived to update NBA Live 95 and NBA Live 96 to offer a “definitive” experience with those games. They aren’t minimalist projects – especially what PeacemanNOT has done – but they still resemble the original game in so much as remaining set in the same reason, albeit with updated and fixed rosters. You can apply this concept to any old favourite that you’d like to revisit and revamp. For example, a “Definitive” or “Remastered” mod for NBA Live 06 PC would add accurate 2006 rosters, update player ratings and fix dunk packages and Freestyle Superstars movesets, and add missing Legends with faces.
If you’re not into retro basketball gaming, you may find this to be a pointless exercise. In fact, even if you are a keen retro basketball gamer, you might not necessarily see the point, and understandably so. After all, there’s a nostalgic appeal to revisiting a game in its vanilla state, with the snapshot of the league that it officially preserves. I for one have no qualms about dusting off an old favourite or giving a game a second look with the rosters it came with, or an official update if one is still available. Once again though, it’s not just about updating the original rosters accurate as of the end of the season or opening night, but also enhancing the overall retro gaming experience.
Although there are many talented people working on basketball video games, they are subject to some limitations that modders are not. We can add Legends that the studio hasn’t been able to license. We can take extra time on textures and models, because we don’t have the same short development cycle and deadline of the release date. We’re not subject to guidelines regarding colour schemes that may result in jerseys that don’t look quite right. If nothing else, we’re extra sets of eyes that can spot errors and oversights in rosters featuring hundreds of players. We can add the polish that the developers simply weren’t able or allowed to, and thus build upon what they created.
As I said, we can also tune the sliders for a more desirable experience, and if we have the knowhow, potentially devise fixes and workarounds for bugs that weren’t resolved in any official patches. In doing so, we can turn games into the best possible version of themselves with the content we wish they originally had. Lighting mods and better textures can make a game that otherwise shows it age look much nicer and up-to-date. There is a certain charm to revisiting old favourite as-is, warts and all. It’s definitely the more authentic experience, and sometimes those quirks are part of the fun! Still, if a beloved classic can be made even more enjoyable to play now, why not give it a try?
Of course, the contemporary current roster updates for old games often did this to the best of their abilities. To that point, it’s worth playing with those old mods in our retro gaming sessions, and using them as a base for new, better updates. However, many of them have been lost to time, particularly rosters that are set in the original season. If a game continued to be updated into the next season and beyond, there’s a good chance that the only rosters that are readily available are from long after the original setting. “Definitive” and “Remastered” projects are basically remaking the roster mods we had during a game’s lifecycle, while aiming to further enhance it in any way that we can.
Needless to say, this isn’t a groundbreaking idea. It’s basically the modding equivalent of a game receiving a re-make/enhanced edition, or the developers pushing through a HD texture pack as a free add-on years later. It isn’t a new concept in modding either, as we’ve seen source ports enhance games such as the original Doom and Doom II, and make them compatible with newer operating systems. There are mods and ROM hacks that leave the basic game intact, but restore hidden content and/or add Quality of Life enhancements, from resolving bugs to removing poorly-designed annoyances to translations into other languages, creating a more polished and accessible game.
There’s no reason we can’t and shouldn’t do that with the older basketball games that we’re keen to revisit. That doesn’t mean that we forget about more ambitious mods for those games, but focusing on fixing and enhancing what’s in the original rosters is a way to make a game even more fun to revisit. Indeed, it can also lay the foundation for larger mods, particularly if it expands upon the array of historical content. This was one of my aims when I fixed up the final official roster for NBA 2K10 by adding missing Legends and tweaking a few ratings for current players. It’s a complete mod as-is, but it can also potentially be used as a base to facilitate larger roster projects.
Furthermore, there are intriguing possibilities as far as revisiting games we used to mod with new knowledge. Obviously that includes a better approach to roster creation – I’d like to think that the Definitive rosters I made for NBA Live 96 are better than my early forays into modding as a teenager! – but also more in-depth tinkering. Many modders in our community have been talented at graphic design, roster editing, and other aspects of modding, but far fewer have been familiar with programming and reverse-engineering. These are useful skills that would help us to develop fixes and technical enhancements, in addition to polishing rosters and re-skinning the games.
The work that Murat has been doing for NBA Live 2005 through NBA Live 08 is a great example of this. From widescreen fixes to hacks that add useful functionality, Murat has developed some handy resources for retro gaming. Would it have been nice to have these solutions when those games were at the height of their popularity? Of course, but in my view, better late than never! Retro gaming and retro modding is always going to be a niche interest – even with NBA 2K fatigue turning gamers’ heads towards old favourites – but that doesn’t mean we can’t try to make that experience even better. Enhancing the original rosters and base game is a good place to start.
Incidentally, while some of my examples and the use of the term “old favourites” may make this seem like an activity for releases from decades ago, this philosophy could easily apply to more recent titles. NBA 2K17 is a game that holds up extremely well, but the original rosters – even with the last official update – can be enhanced. There are missing players that can be added to the classic teams. The Dream Team and All-Time College Teams – available as DLC on console, but hidden on PC – could be unlocked. I’m certain there are fixes that’d make the final 2017 rosters more authentic! The same goes for other newer games that are nevertheless “retro” at this juncture.
Fixing unresolved issues and adding polish beyond more authentic rosters and art is an area of untapped potential for our community, but the more familiar activity of updating games and improving their aesthetic is still worthwhile. Again, I don’t want to discourage more ambitious roster projects or modding the latest game, but I do like the idea of creating works that can make retro gaming even better. Given my current basketball gaming habits, it’s something that I’m particularly interested in doing, and I’ll obviously share any completed projects with the community. Some may scoff, but a lot of classics are still worth playing, especially when they get a fresh coat of paint.
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