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.

The Response to "Look, Single-Player People are Just Better"

I started writing this post up in the comments section of this Kotaku article (originally posted elsewhere I believe) by John Walker, and it got long enough that I decided to just post it here.  This is my first "real" blog post that isn't merely an inane chronicle of my NBA Live career.

Walker writes a long lamentation on the decline of single-player games.  He strongly prefers single-player, and until a few months ago (when I started playing LittleBigPlanet online) I would have agreed with him wholeheartedly.  I still do agree to an extent although I am more open-minded than he is.

Where he goes off the rails is with crap like this:

"The worth of single-player comes in the form of narrative. As with any good novel, or a finely crafted film.  It is the equivalent to literature. While multiplayer is an ill-informed argument. It has no direction, no beginning nor end, no meaning." [weird sentence structure errors are his of course]

When film was first starting out, movies often amounted to not much more than filmed stage plays.  As the cinema developed, filmmakers realized that there were tools available to them with film that cannot exist in the written word or on stage.  The camera, editing, close-ups, montage, special effects, etc.  Film developed its own language and in most cases it no longer resembles stage plays.

Video games are now at the same stage that early film was at.  The end-all be-all, say Walker and his ilk, is to make games that are "cinematic" (or "literary") experiences, experiences that have a beginning and an end, experiences that have "meaning".  But games are not movies, nor are they books.  Suggesting that multiplayer games have "no meaning" is stuck in the mindset of those older media.  Games can do things that those media cannot.  What are those things exactly?  Hell, I don't know - in terms of realizing their full potential, games are just getting started.  But I can provide some ideas.

Tom Bissell, in his book "Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter" (which anybody who is interested enough to engage in serious debates like this should read), writes about an experience playing Left 4 Dead in which he displayed cowardice that he eventually turned around into a triumphal sacrifice.  Was that authored by the game developers?  No.  Does the fact that his powerful and memorable experience was not specifically intended by the developers make any difference?  No.  Walker (along with numerous RPG and adventure game players) apparently thinks it does matter, and that's incorrect.

Walker enjoys his tongue-in-cheek snobbery and superiority complex to those brainless morons who sit around picking their noses playing multiplayer all day, but in a sense they are more advanced than Walker is in terms of experiencing games in meaningful ways that aren't trying to ape the conventions of other media.  Walker wants to guide a character through a pre-set routine with a beginning and an end that the developer has plastered "meaning" onto (generally in a clumsy manner), where character deaths and intended "emotional experiences" are pre-determined and The Hero's Journey is neatly laid out.  But those multiplayer imbeciles are creating their own heartbreaks and triumphs, and those triumphs feel far more "real" and meaningful than most games with rigid stories could ever hope to feel.

My criticisms by no means apply to all single-player games, nor does my praise apply only to multiplayer games.  I am speaking more to the core of Walker's argument, which is that meaningful gaming experiences come from single-player narratives.

Walker, and those of you who agree with him, should read "Extra Lives", read the following discussion between Bissell and Simon Ferrari, and especially read this excellent blog post by the Brainy Gamer, in which Michael Abbott explains why the heavily authored Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep was far less meaningful to him than another RPG he played at the same time which was "old school" and provided very little story structure.

You should also keep an eye on this blog, as I've been planning on writing a simple introduction to thinking about video games more intelligently.

The Live '97

I likely bought NBA Live '97 at FuncoLand (now GameStop) at some point in 1998 or early 1999.  I got the version for the original Playstation.  I did not start right in on a season with this one like I did with '96, choosing to dawdle around with the game quite a bit first.

 
This season, I really began to think about the fascinating philosophical question of where your skill level should be at when you start a sports game season.  One should not just jump right into a season without becoming familiar with the controls and gameplay, because then one would be horrible in the beginning.  On the other hand, one should not practice so much that one is already blowing out the computer in every game from the start.  Where is that happy medium?

At first I thought that your skill level should be such that you are capable of beating the best ranked team in the game, playing as the team you are going to play as for the game length that you are going to play.  So in other words, I would have to beat the Chicago Bulls (the number 1 team) using the Knicks in a 48 minute exhibition game.  I soon realized that this wasn't optimal, because theoretically it might not be possible to beat a team better than you.  I remembered reading in video game magazines that with some football games it was no longer possible to beat "any team with any team", and I took the lesson to heart.

So my theory was modified.  I decided that you merely needed to be able to beat your own team in an exhibition game.  Knicks vs. Knicks - the game allowed you to do this.  I started a tradition of the annual "Knicks vs. Knicks Exhibition Game".  How such a game can happen in the continuity of my dynasty in what is supposed to be the real world, I have no idea, but I still imagine Mike Breen or Marv Albert announcing it.

This solution was later modified further in future seasons, but that's the gist of it for now.

Live '97 was significantly harder than the prior two games.  My hope (and fear) was that this would ensure a tough season with a legitimate possibility of failure, where I would possibly lose to the Bulls or another team in the playoffs when all was said and done.

As I wrote earlier, I putzed around a lot with this game before finally following through with a season.  Some of this had to do with the first game.  It was against the Raptors in Toronto.  In real life, I remembered watching the game and it was some sort of NBA anniversary thing (perhaps the first NBA game ever was a Toronto team versus the Knicks or something like that), with the teams wearing classic jerseys.  It was also the very first game of that NBA season.  Because of how "special" it was, I had an OCD thing where I wanted to score the first bucket of the season and also win the game.  I had to restart when I didn't, and even restarted the entire season several times once I got deeper, perhaps after as many as 10+ games.  I don't know what my thought process was there.

The opening game that finally "counted" was one where I was up by 1 at the closing seconds, and Patrick Ewing blocked the potential game-winning Toronto buzzer shot from the free throw line.

The real life time frame for the early part of the season is hazy, but it was probably the fall of '98 or winter of '99.  There was one game that I was playing in my living room.  My sister had a friend over, and the friend's brother had arrived to take her home.  To get to the side door, she had to pass in front of the TV where I was deep into a game.  She attempted an acrobatic leap over the controller cord, caught her foot on it, and pulled the entire system off of the chair it was resting on in a devastating crash.  The girl was probably around 13 and was in shock at what she had just done, having possibly destroyed some stranger's Playstation.  A long stream of drool came out of her mouth as she stood agape, and it was a fairly disturbing sight.  I don't know if I've ever mentioned it before now, and I don't know if anybody else saw the drool (there is also a slight chance I was seeing things, but I doubt it).  I hurriedly tried to reassure her, saying "it's okay, it's okay..." several times while picking up the system.

The Playstation was none the worse for wear.

The season went on, but unlike '95 and '96 I did not have much dedication.  I took long breaks between games, going in spurts and then not playing for months at a time.  My record was probably always just about tops in the league, but I lost my fair share of games.  During the summer of 1999, I had a small stretch of games that were all very close and exciting, alternating between wins and losses.  One was the game that, according to the real NBA schedule for that year (http://www.databasebasketball.com/teams/teamscores.htm?tm=NYK&yr=1996&lg=N), took place on January 23, 1997 in Indiana.  My Knicks were up by 1, but Reggie Miller the Knick Killer himself hit a well-contested 18 footer at the buzzer to sink us.  This aggravated me enough that I put the game away again for months.

Fall of '99 was my first semester away at college.  Towards the end of September on a lazy weekday afternoon in the dorm room, I decided it was time to continue the season.  The game was at the Charlotte Hornets (who had the prettiest court, with the honeycomb lane) on January 24, 1997.  As the game drew to a close, I was once again pissed off - I was down by 6, headed for another frustrating loss, and ready to shelve the game again for a month.  With less than 10 seconds to go, Allan Houston hits a three pointer from the right elbow.  Down 3 now, but still a long shot.  Houston goes for the foul on the inbounds pass...and manages to steal the ball.  I nearly panic and shoot the open lay-up, but quickly catch myself since I need a 3.  There are now only 2-3 seconds left on the clock, not even enough time for Houston to run behind the line and throw up a prayer.  As is the norm with the AI, my teammates were all back on the other end of the floor.

But then, of all people, none other than Patrick Ewing himself comes barreling down the court.  He's headed for the far corner.  I throw it to him before he even gets to the spot.  He plants behind the three-point line, turns, jumps, catches, and shoots all in one motion, the buzzer sounds, and...BANG!  Patrick Ewing ties the game at the buzzer, in one of the most improbable endings in NBA history.  Replays confirm that Ewing shot at the last possible tenth of a second - the ball was still in his hand at 0.1.  We win easily in overtime, and this blows my season wide open, sparking something like a 27 game winning streak.

After that I got my suitemates rooting for me, and they would often sit to watch games or listen to recaps.  It was a shame that I hadn't told them about it before the Charlotte game so that I could celebrate publically.  There was a game late in the season against Orlando where I was down by 3.  I invited my suitemates Roger and Casey into the room to watch the closing moments, despite it being midnight with my roommate John trying to sleep.  I brought the ball up with Chris Childs and took the potential game-tying 3, missing it.  Roger criticized my play, telling me that you're not supposed to shoot in that situation with the person who brings the ball up court.  Not sure if that makes any sense, but certainly I should have had Houston take the shot at the very least.

At some point I caught wind of the fact that my roommate (the suite was made up of 3 rooms of 2) was annoyed by my late-night playing.

At the end of the regular season my record was probably in the ballpark of 67-15, similar to Live '95.  I ran into the dreaded Chicago in the 2nd or 3rd round.  I lost one game to them, and when I told my friend Casey about this he said "son" in a disapproving tone and shook his head in disgust, walking away.  He knew as well as I did that towards the end of the season I had become unstoppable, and would probably not have lost a game in the playoffs unless I was basically trying to lose.  He was probably right.

On being unstoppable - after playing dozens of regular season games for 48 minutes a piece, you begin to pick up on certain tendencies of the computer and learn to exploit them.  In this game, an easy way to score was to get yourself isolated in the post.  You would fake away from the basket, and the opposing player would go flying for the fake.  Then you would spin back towards the basket and generally get an easy lay-up or dunk.  I wish it didn't always become that easy in NBA games (but as you'll see in future seasons, it doesn't always).

I repeated and won the NBA Championship easily, losing only the one game, to the Bulls, throughout the playoffs.

The Live '96

I bought NBA Live '96 for the Super Nintendo at a Blockbuster (I think my dad paid for it), in I believe the summer of 1997.  There is a slim chance it was '98 or '96, but '97 makes the most sense.  I played an exhibition game and won it pretty easily, so I started up a season almost right away.  No dawdling for months like with Live '95 - I was hungry to get back on the court.

This SNES version was a lot easier than the PC version of '95, because of controls if nothing else.  Also, I now knew that I should be getting into the paint rather than popping 3s.  You could get into the paint with reckless abandon in that game, and I did.  Derek Harper was the point guard.  I would have him bring the ball up and then try to penetrate.  He usually could and then score an easy dunk/lay-up at the rim.  If not, I passed around and tried something else.  In general though you could score at will.  Harper was my scoring leader and I am fairly certain he scored over 100 points at least once.  I think it goes without saying that I play these games on the hardest difficulty level by the way.

For much of the season, I was playing with a broken controller.  It wouldn't allow you to move around freely, so it was a slight handicap although it didn't matter much.  For one game against the Seattle Supersonics, it did matter.  Looking at the real NBA schedule from that season, it appears that this would be the game from January 19th, 1996 in Seattle.  I lost the game - I think it was close, but do not remember the final margin of loss.  That was my first loss, and if it is that game then I would have been 36-0 going into it.  36-1.

During the March 8th game (remember these are game dates, not real - it was all played in the summer of '97 in my room) against Philadelphia, I got frustrated when a computer opponent knocked me down without a foul call, even though I was winning big.  I purposely knocked down and fouled one of their guys, which I sometimes did when frustrated.  I started doing it every play, and some of my guys started fouling out.  Soon I was interested to see what would happen if there were only 5 guys left and one fouled out.  I kept fouling until only 5 of us were left...when one of the last 5 fouled out, nothing happened - they left them in the game with 6+ fouls.  Mystery solved.

By that point I had let the Sixers back into the game with all of the free throws, after having been up by a comfortable margin.  I wound up down 3 with time winding down.  I inbounded and took a 3...no good but I managed to grab the rebound.  I would have one last chance - I kicked it back out...and the ball went to Charles Smith in the backcourt.  The genius had already run down the floor to get back on defense.  Turnover, game over.

In real life, the Knicks' head coach Don Nelson had been fired right before this game.  Now there was a reason in my personal narrative for the Knicks to be firing their coach who had a 58-1 record.  He disgraced the team and caused a big scandal with the intentional foul-outs.  Enter Jeff Van Gundy.

The final game of the regular season was against Boston.  I noticed that I had never scored over 200+ points in a game, and had never held a team below 100 (defense is hard).  I really made an effort to go for that, and I hit both goals in the final game.

The playoffs were a breeze; we swept them all.  Along the way, some revenge was had.  We defeated the Magic, and I believe even played Houston in the finals, who the real Knicks (and the fake Knicks since there was no history before '95) lost to in '94.  One note about the playoffs is that for some reason they were shortened - the first round was I think a best of 3, with the remaining rounds best of 5 (it's supposed to be 5-7-7-7).  I'm not sure if that was the game's fault or mine.

The Live '95

First, let me again say that I expect virtually nobody to find these interesting - they are largely for me; I enjoy reading about my own triumphs and failings in video game sports, and I wish I had been writing on them in detail all along.

We come to my first full season - NBA Live '95, played in the winter of 1996.  The above screenshot is a good representation of my entire season.  That's John Starks of the Knicks shooting a 3, and that was my go-to play in the game.

At that time, I did not have much of a grasp on good basketball strategy.  I'm not claiming that I do now, but I certainly know better than I did then.  My favorite player in real life and the game was John Starks.  As I said, much of my play consisted of having him shoot 3 pointers.  That was a bad idea, because 3s were hard to make in that game.  In one particular game, Starks scored 96 points; I was trying to have him beat Wilt Chamberlain's record.  He didn't make it, and we lost the game. 

I played probably 1.5 games on average per day.  There were days when I played 3 games after school (remember, these are full games that take about an hour each), and that was probably the max.  I often used to nap during halftime.

There was a high school friend (9th grade) I talked to about Live.  He hated the Knicks, and recommended me a high-powered team to try out.  He wrote the names on a piece of paper while we were in a class, or maybe in the East Cafeteria.  I traded most of my players for that team - the starting 5 were Hakeem Olajuwon, Shawn Kemp, Scottie Pippen, Kendall Gill (the friend was a Sonics fan), and Gary Payton.  I know Ewing was on the bench and don't remember the others.  I made more trades from time to time - the game let you trade any player for any player, so you could get rid of your scrubs and get all-stars in return.  I might have had Reggie Miller at one point, and I traded for Mitch Richmond after he lit up the Knicks in a game on January 13th, 1996, which I listened to on the radio at my grandparents' house.  (Note - thinking about the real-life timeline with Mitch Richmond, it is possible that I started the season in late 1995.)  The game rated your team in different attributes, and I often strove to make trades to become a full 5 stars in every category.

I remember one memorable game where Olajuwon hit an 8 footer from the side for the win in the closing seconds.  I don't remember any other close finishes in detail.

When the season's trading deadline came up, the game warned me.  I thought about it, and I concluded that I should trade to get all of the original Knicks back.  I could not take this super team to the playoffs, it wouldn't be right.  I was going to live or die with the Knicks as they truly were.

In general, the game was easy.  Even with my poor knowledge of strategy and constant 3 point bombs I had the best record in the league, somewhere around 67-15 I would guess.  We went to the playoffs with home court advantage throughout.

The first two rounds weren't a problem.  In the Eastern Conference Finals, we played the Orlando Magic and promptly went up 3-1 in the series.  At that time in history, I believe only 4 real life teams had come back from a 3-1 deficit, so I was sitting pretty.  When I was behind in Game 5, I wasn't that concerned because I would have two more chances.  I did not put any extra effort into making a comeback, and lost the game.  Series at 3-2.  We lost again in Orlando, a blowout.  3-3.

A brief interlude on losses.  Many people say "why don't you just restart the game if you lose".  To do that would be to ruin the entire purpose, for me, of playing seasons.  There has to be a real sense of danger, a real chance that you might lose individual games and even overall in the playoffs, and that all that grinding would be for naught.  Winning the championship every year with no adversity is not fun.  Here are a couple of links to recent blog posts about losing:

http://disqus.com/forums/gamermelodico/just_doing_what_the_lions_do_best/trackback/
http://www.pippinbarr.com/inininoutoutout/?p=1541

So, the entire season came down to this one game.  Game 7, Knicks-Magic, at the Garden.  Keep in mind that this season takes place over the course of months, with 100+ hours of playing time (with all of the false starts and exhibition games, I have probably played NBA Live '95 more than any other game in any genre).  Getting knocked out of the playoffs would be huge.  It was now probably February of 1996.

At halftime of Game 7 I was already down big, by 20 or so.  I likely took a nap or tried to, wanting to delay what looked like the inevitable.  After the 3rd quarter I was still down big.  I remember pumping myself up, knowing I needed to make this one last push and come back.

I never made it close.  My Knicks lost the series 4 games to 3 on a dark, cold winter's night on Long Island.

The Dynasty

This is the first of what will be a series of posts chronicling my NBA Live dynasty.  I expect that it will interest almost nobody, but I still need to write down the history for myself and for posterity.

I have been playing the NBA Live video game series since the first one - NBA Live '95.  The games allow you to play full seasons, and I do - 82 games plus the playoffs.  I play full length games with 12 minute quarters.  As you can imagine, this is a brutal grind.  It is so brutal that I am now, almost in the real year 2011, still only playing NBA Live '99, so I have only gotten through 4 full seasons so far in the 15 years I've been playing.  Most people who do this play shortened seasons with short quarters, but I strive for authenticity.

I started the dynasty with NBA Live '95 in January or February of 1996 (NBA Live '96 had already come out).  The version I was playing ran on MS-DOS for the PC, controlled with the keyboard.

I played around with the game for quite a while before getting "serious".  There was many an exhibition game played, and I had several false starts to seasons where I eventually restarted for reasons that I cannot recall - probably having to do with being unhappy with my team's record.  There might have been a season that I played a good 15-20 full games of before restarting.

My team is the New York Knicks.  The real Knicks have been "my" team in real life since June of 1994, and I became an increasingly hardcore fan as the 1990s progressed.  There was never a question that I was ever going to play a full season as any team other than the New York Knicks, and they are who I am playing NBA Live '99 with today.

In general I am excellent at placing memories in space-time.  You know how people know exactly what they were doing on 9/11 or when Kennedy was shot?  I remember exactly what I was doing on December 29th, 1995 between 4 PM and 6 PM, walking past the girl in corduroy pants on November 30th, 1996, the cologne I bought in January of 2001, and the book I was reading on the toilet in ~April of 1997 (The Godfather).

The point being, I remember quite a bit of detail about my NBA Live seasons, even the ones that I played 15 years ago.  So, I'm going to recap seasons in this blog with as much detail as possible.

I planned on writing about the first season in this post, but the introduction has taken longer than expected, so I will end this for now.  To be continued (in way more detail than you'll ever need to know)...

The Test

Just a test. 

I am planning on titling every post "The X".  This was a rule made on Seinfeld so that writers didn't waste a lot of time trying to think up clever titles.  I'm doing it for the same reason.