The Live 98 Seasons (continued)

In the spring of 2002 I made another attempt at a multiplayer Live 98 season, this time with my suitemate Colin in Colonial Tower up at Albany. I was of course the Knicks, and I'm actually not sure who he played as. This was again the shortest season possible - 20-something games, 2 minute quarters.

The season went as expected, and as always I met Jordan's Bulls in the playoffs. It was a tough 7 game series that I don't have details of. However, once again, before actually getting to play against each other in the playoffs our efforts were stifled. My PlayStation memory card was corrupted, which I think was a common problem with NBA Live 98.

Fast-forward to a year later when we started over in a new venue - our friend's room (his bed in fact) at Empire Commons, which was SUNY Albany's new classy upperclassmen housing. This time Colin played as the Heat.

Again, the season went as expected. I won our regular season match-up and was the top seed. Colin and I were on an Eastern Conference Finals collision course. Then I ran into the brick wall of the mighty Chicago Bulls in round 2 and fell behind 3 games to 1.

The thing with these 2 minute quarters is that it makes for much closer games. If I'm playing a 48 minute game against the computer I might languish at points, get outscored one quarter, go scoreless for 5 minutes, etc. However, over the course of 48 minutes I'm eventually going to pull away definitively, most of the time. The shorter the time, the greater the variance. In an 8 minute game, if I go scoreless for 5 minutes I'm screwed. If I get outscored over what would have been just 2/3rds of a quarter, I've lost the game. This makes things more exciting and is generally desirable.

So in those first 4 games against Chicago, every single game came down to the wire. I had an old AIM away message that detailed each game, but you know how you hear about moms in the 1960s finally throwing out their grown-up son's huge valuable comic book collection? Well, my mom thought it was okay to throw out my old computers, so the detailed history is now lost forever.

Being down 3-1 is tough even when you're clearly better than the other team. Even if you're as high as a 79% favorite in every game, you're still probably going to lose the series (you have to be on the good side of 79% three times in a row, which only happens 49.3% of the time). There's no way I was a 79% favorite against the Bulls, so I was in quite a bad spot.

Those games were something else. We're talking buzzer beaters, overtime, shots with .2 left, etc. - and this continued past the first 4 games. In Game 5 I was nearly finished. Colin was watching, and I was down 3 with just seconds to go. When I hit the 3 to tie, the gravity of the moment made Colin literally cry out and fall backwards. Even though I was an opposing team, at that moment we were teammates.

I won Game 6 and then did, indeed, win Game 7 - both close. Overall an incredible, brutal series and probably the best I will ever be a part of.

The Non-Canonical Seasons

This is one of my favorite topics.  It deals with seasons of NBA games I played that are "unofficial".  From Wikipedia, here is what I mean by "canon":

"[T]he term canon denotes the material accepted as 'official' in a fictional universe..." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_%28fiction%29)

The official canon of my NBA fictional universe are the full seasons of NBA Live '95, '96, '97, '98 and '99 that I have played.  If I have played additional shortened seasons of any of these games (which I have) or seasons of other NBA games (which I have), those are not "official".  They can still be amazing, dramatic and memorable, just not "real".

Please note that I will not be discussing my full season of Madden '95 with 15 minute quarters for the Super Nintendo in which I went undefeated.

After finishing the official NBA Live '97 season in late 1999 I got my hands on NBA Live '98, again for the original PlayStation.  I did not start the official '98 season right away, and in fact did not start that season for a number of years.  But we'll get to that later.

At some point I discovered that you could play through a season with more than one player controlling more than one team.  So, at the beginning of the season I could select the Knicks, and a friend could select another team (more than two could do this).  We would each play our games on the same system when they were scheduled, alternating between us as necessary.  If our teams met in the regular season or playoffs, we would of course play against each other using two controllers.  That was the hope - that we would play a season mostly independently, and eventually meet for a winner-takes-all playoff series.  It would be a disappointment if one of us were to be knocked out before that point.

My first attempt at a multiplayer season was with my suitemate Anish in May of 2000, and we were probably already into school finals at that time.  We played the shortest season possible, 26-ish games, with the shortest quarters possible, 2 minutes.  He was the Heat, I was the Knicks.  The regular season went by uneventfully.  For the All-Star game, since we were both Eastern Conference teams we played together with 2 controllers as teammates.

As the semester was coming to a close and move-out day was approaching, we got to the playoffs. I won a tough series against the Bulls (this becomes a theme). He finished his series or two as well and it was time for us to play against each other in a playoff series. However, at that point I guess I burned out on playing so many games in a very short period of time and lost interest in finishing. We never did. Those two teams and that particular iteration of the 1998 NBA season will now hang in limbo for the rest of eternity.