Wayback Wednesday is a weekly feature that comes out - as the name would imply - every Wednesday. It's your midweek blast from the past, inckuding features and retrospectives on old basketball video games, old NLSC feature articles and editorials published as-is with added commentary, and other flashback content. This is a central discussion thread for the feature, in which I invite you to post any feedback along with your responses to each column's topic. A link to the latest article can always be found here in the first post, along with a link to the complete archive.
Latest Feature
Wayback Wednesday: Roster Updates for NBA Full Court Press
While Microsoft's NBA Inside Drive series was respectably popular in the early 2000s, many long-time gamers may forget about its predecessor, NBA Full Court Press. It's understandable, of course. Its name didn't spawn a series of titles like Inside Drive, Live, 2K, ShootOut, and so on, and it was also exclusive to PC. Additionally, although it has its strong points and it's interesting to revisit it today, it didn't have the best gameplay or most well-designed modes. I'd suggest that Microsoft made similar mistakes with NBA Inside Drive 2000, before the series took a big leap with 2002.
One of the interesting aspects of NBA Full Court Press is that it was a 1997 season title that featured 1996 season rosters. A few years earlier, it wouldn't have been unusual for a game to launch without updated lineups and a new rookie crop, but that approach had fallen out of vogue by 1996. I've previously covered NBA Full Court Press with a retrospective back in 2018, but the issue of its outdated rosters deserves another look; especially because there were actually some official roster updates that I neglected to mention! Let's take a look back...way back...