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: The Lockout Rosters of NBA 2K12
NBA 2K12 wasn't the first game with rosters affected by a lockout. Due to their early release, the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis/Mega Drive versions of NBA Live 96 had to launch with 1995 season rosters (and a workaround to add missing players, as well as an expansion draft). NBA Live 99 was also affected by a lockout, though the PC version did receive a 1999 season roster update on top of the fixes provided by an official patch. A combination of an earlier release and the extremely brief lockout of 1996 caused NBA Full Court Press to feature the previous campaign's rosters.
Those are just some of the most prominent examples. The lockouts of 1995, 1996, and 1998 affected a handful of other games released around the same time as those titles, as naturally everyone's hands were tied by the same restrictions of a labour stoppage. However, there were a few differences with the lockout rosters of NBA 2K12. On top of only one other game being affected that year, it was an issue that could now be resolved post-launch across all platforms, not just on PC. There were also some new challenges, particularly after online support ended. Let's take a look back...way back...