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 provides five more corrections to errors in previous articles.

It’s been a while since I last issued some corrections to errors I’ve made in previous articles, so that must mean I’ve been completely accurate since then! Well, possibly not, though once again going back and correcting my mistakes a couple of times now has encouraged me to be more thorough with my research and fact-checking. I’d like to think that I’ve been successful in those efforts, though when you are your own editor and fact-checker, you’re definitely at risk of oversight! Whenever that happens, the best that you can do is to be transparent and provide the necessary corrections.

Obviously, that includes editing the original articles and adding the relevant footnotes, which I recently did for my NBA Jam 99 retrospective. However, I also believe that there’s value in spotlighting my mistakes like this. It feels even more transparent, as edits to the original articles can go unread. Additionally, it gives me the opportunity to dive back into those topics with the accuracy I wish I’d had the first time around, and share some interesting stories and trivia. I’d also prefer to be someone who can admit when they’re wrong and learn from their mistakes, rather than just double-down out of foolish pride. To that end, here are five more errors in my articles that I must correct!

1. These Players Actually Had Official Appearances in Games

Roster trivia can be tricky. There have been hundreds of basketball video games for numerous platforms over the years, and while my collection is large, I still don’t own every single hoops title. A handful of old games also received official roster updates, which I may or may not be able to get hold of. As such, as thorough as I endeavour to be with my research, some examples may fly under my radar. This was the case when I profiled twenty players with no official appearances in video games. That was an accurate statement to make about most of the players on that list, but since then, I’ve discovered that a few of them can actually claim rare virtual hardwood appearances.

More specifically, the official roster update for NBA Full Court Press added Steve Hamer, Brett Szabo, and Ray Owes. Hamer and Szabo both played their only NBA seasons for a Celtics team that was unsuccessful in tanking for Tim Duncan, with Szabo actually starting 24 of his 70 games. Meanwhile, Owes appeared in 57 games for the Warriors. All three were signed too late to appear in other 1997 season games, and were gone before they could be included in any 1998 titles. Again, they’re only in NBA Full Court Press when using the official 1997 roster update, but I do count such updates when it comes to video game appearances, so a correction is in order here.

2. NBA Full Court Press Did Get Updated

To that point, this list of corrections also needs to acknowledge the official updates for NBA Full Court Press! When I covered the game for Wayback Wednesday all the way back in 2018, I noted that while it was set in the 1997 season, it had 1996 season rosters. That was accurate, but I’d forgotten that it received a couple of patches. This was a particularly egregious oversight on my part since I’d located and uploaded those files to our Downloads section for safekeeping some six years earlier! Indeed, errors like this are why I’m not only open to issuing corrections, but going back to produce revised retrospectives of games when I feel I could’ve done a better job with them.

As I noted in my article covering the official patches for NBA Full Court Press, an unfortunate combination of an early release and the brief lockout of 1996 is the likely culprit for the game’s outdated rosters. Given that it was a PC release, the developers were able to eventually remedy that issue with the game’s second patch. This update in late December meant the game actually ended up featuring some short-lived stints and obscure appearances, such as the aforementioned three players. It also included the updates from the first patch, such as adding net animations and fixing a couple of officiating bugs. In other words, important things to mention in any retrospective!

3. Anfernee Hardaway’s Heat Stint Appears in NBA 2K8

This is perhaps more of a clarification, but it’s still worth noting. When I mentioned Anfernee Hardaway’s stint with the Miami Heat in Part 5 of my Wayback Wednesday series on Familiar Faces in Strange Places, I didn’t explicitly say that it didn’t officially appear in any video games. However, I made the assumption that if it did, it would’ve been via an official roster update. This was due to erroneously recalling Penny joining the Heat after the season began, when in fact he signed with them in August 2007. As such, while Penny’s comeback missed the cut-off for NBA Live 08, you’ll find him in Miami in NBA 2K8, albeit sporting his familiar #1 instead of the #7 he’d briefly wear.

Unfortunately, I can’t claim an inability to have double-checked the rosters in NBA 2K8 before writing that article. Digging deep into my archived emails, I see that I’ve had the Xbox 360 version since 2015, and I wrote that article in 2021, so I could’ve (and should’ve) booted up the game and done my due diligence. Instead, I allowed vague memories of adding him to a roster update for NBA Live 08 PC and a mistaken recollection of when he joined the team to assume there was no reason to investigate further. Again, while I didn’t outright say the stint wasn’t in any games, I implied that might be the case. At the very least, I should’ve been more accurate and detailed there.

4. Michael Jordan in Flight Supports Joystick Control

There haven’t been too many basketball games that utilise mouse controls, and for good reason. It’s definitely not the genre for it, and the concept isn’t console-friendly. With that being said, there have been a few PC-exclusive hoops titles that used mouse controls, with Michael Jordan in Flight arguably being the best-known among long-time basketball gamers. Naturally I made a point of mentioning the game’s rare use of mouse controls in my retrospective, as well as in a couple of articles where I reflected on games that I’m oddly nostalgic for, and the weird quirks of 90s basketball games. There’s no mistake there; Michael Jordan in Flight definitely utilises mouse controls!

My mistake was in stating that the mouse controls were the only option in Michael Jordan in Flight. In fact, the game does also support joystick control. The mouse is the default controller though, and the only way to switch to joystick control is to run the separate configuration program. This wasn’t unusual back in the days of DOS gaming, but it does mean that there’s no in-game option to select which method of control you want to use, making it easy to overlook. It’s still a failure on my part to do the proper research, though. The joystick controls don’t add any extra functionality, and I’d say the mouse controls make the game more interesting, but nevertheless, I was incorrect.

5. The Differences Between NBA Live 95 SNES & Genesis

Let’s wrap up this third list of corrections to previous articles with the 16-bit versions of NBA Live 95. That’s how I’ve referred to the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis (aka Mega Drive) versions of NBA Live 95 in a number of articles over the years. Now, that is technically correct; they are both 16-bit consoles, and the SNES and Genesis versions of NBA Live 95 are more alike to each other than they are the PC release (though both the PC and Genesis versions lack a steal button, whereas the SNES version has one). There are some key differences between them though, so I’ve been inaccurate in referring to them collectively as “the 16-bit version” of the game.

Beyond slight differences in their graphics and audio, the SNES and Genesis versions of NBA Live 95 aren’t identical in content. The SNES version has final 1994 season rosters and no Roster Players, while the Genesis release features updated offseason rosters, a plethora of placeholders, and one Class of 1994 rookie (Eddie Jones). The players run out onto the floor during starting lineup introductions on Genesis, and the music from the game’s intro is recycled. On SNES, we just see their portraits, and the pre-game ditty keeps playing. Ratings are numerical on SNES, and a power bar on Genesis. And so, I’m now more careful about referring to them as the same game.

As always, I’m open to making more corrections to previous articles and diving into the actual details, so if you ever encounter any errors, please let me know! In that spirit, feel free to post those corrections right here in the comments, or in 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 Corrections to Previous Articles (Part 3) appeared first on NLSC.