Thursday, February 23, 2012

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.