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: Updated Releases & Unusual Editions
Official patches are a touchy subject in gaming discourse nowadays. Many gamers believe that games are released with less polish because they can be fixed post-launch with patches, including day one updates. Gamers have also grown weary of constant updates, especially when patches are often several gigabytes in size. These concerns and criticisms are understandable, and I generally share them. At the same time, it’s inevitable with games becoming larger in scope. Furthermore, it’s preferable to a time when games rarely received patches on PC, and never received them on console.
Of course, even before patches existed in their current form and were generally PC-exclusive, games did receive fixes and updates. From different revisions of arcade ROMs to a second run of discs and cartridges containing a newer version of a title, many games back in the day received updated releases. This included being re-packaged as some kind of special edition: classics and bestseller lines, compilation packs, and so on. To that end, there have been some updated releases and unusual editions of basketball games over the years. Let’s take a look back...way back...