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Thursday, May 9, 2013
11:22 AM - May 9, 2013. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
I’ve built a lot of Associations in NBA 2K13 that would never work in real life. Yes, it’s partly because I’ve abused the trade logic to get what I wanted, but even disregarding that, the teams I like to make tend to be heavy on talent and light on experience. I’ve won the Larry O’Brien Trophy before with a team of players all under 24, and that’s not something you see very often. (The youngest team to win an NBA Championship was the 1976-77 Portland Trail Blazers, whose median age was 24.)
In their own perverse way, the real life Los Angeles Lakers tried to do something similar this year. Instead of a team of young up-and-comers, though, they put together a roster that was heavy on talent and experience, but old, injury-prone, and without a clear direction.
Read More - NBA 2K13: Why did the Lakers dissappoint?
Monday, October 22, 2012
12:33 PM - October 22, 2012. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
I have a dirty secret: I love Steve Novak.
Don’t get me wrong: I love Kevin Durant and LeBron James, too, and they’re an absolute joy to play with in NBA2K13, but the developers weren’t kidding when they said that Signature Skills would do a lot to highlight the end of your bench. And there’s humble little Steve Novak, a 53 overall, draining corner 3s for me and bailing me out. In addition to making role players better at, well, playing a role, Sig Skills have also made it possible to build a team more distinctly. The game hasn’t been out very long, so it’s still a little early to tell exactly how all the new Sig Skills are going to mesh with each other, but it should suffice to say that building your Association team from the ground up in a fantasy draft is a much different thing this year.
Read More - NBA 2K13: Building a Team Around Signature Skills
Thursday, October 18, 2012
02:48 PM - October 18, 2012. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
Firstly, let me tell you what this is not: a post about the best slider sets out there or even one about what makes for the best slider set. There are plenty of thoroughly researched and test-driven slider sets up on 2K Share — many of them from OS users who have crafted great matched sets of rosters and sliders for. As a starting point, I highly recommend looking into mkharsh33's slider set, which seeks, among other things, to help the problem of the CPU grabbing defensive rebounds and taking off on unstoppable fast breaks — a real problem, in my opinion. But look at the headline again: the right gameplay blend will be the right one for you.
Read More - NBA 2K13: Finding the Right Gameplay Blend With Sliders
Friday, September 28, 2012
03:41 PM - September 28, 2012. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
The advent of Signature Skills in NBA 2K13 heralds a shift in approach for the NBA 2K series that could have a profound effect on the way people play the game. The system promises to make players whose games are more unorthodox stand out, from the sweet-shooting, terror-on-the-glass approach of Kevin Love to the all-grit, all-grind defense of Tony Allen to the corner-3-carpet-bombing of Ray Allen and Jason Terry. But are we just going to pretend players only have positive traits?
After all, if what 2K Sports is after is a more realistic, nuanced simulation of players’ quirks and individual games, surely they need to look at including a counterweight to players’ good tendencies with something like Signature Flaws.
Here’s a look at a couple of tongue-in-cheek ideas for such a system.
Read More - Signature Flaws for NBA 2K13
Friday, September 7, 2012
02:37 PM - September 7, 2012. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
The advanced statistical revolution has arrived in the basketball, just a few years behind its arrival in baseball. As documented in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, the use of sabermetric stats in baseball led to a dramatic turnaround for the woebegone Oakland A’s in 2002. Those same principles also played a big part in getting the Boston Red Sox their first World Series title in 86 years in 2004.
In basketball, statisticians like John Hollinger have developed metrics like Player Efficiency Rating (PER) in an effort to go beyond the often deceptive per-game numbers that have been in use for generations. The NBA 2K series has responded to this evolution by providing advanced metrics in its last several iterations, including stats like True Shooting Percentage, Effective Field Goal Percentage, the aforementioned PER, and others.
But there’s so much more they could do.
Read More - NBA 2K13: More Advanced Stats Are Needed
Wednesday, September 5, 2012
12:25 PM - September 5, 2012. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
Players come at sports video games from a lot of different angles these days. You can run a fantasy draft and make the dream team you’ve always wanted. You can try to take your favorite team as-is and do your best to better them. You can play with friends or strangers around the world. But ever since I can remember, my favorite part of any title has been designing my own player to draft onto my favorite team or (more recently) run through a game’s career mode.
And since the beginning, the NBA 2K series has been disappointing me with its hairstyles.
Read More - NBA 2K Hairstyle Disasters
Friday, August 24, 2012
02:10 PM - August 24, 2012. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
Over at IGN.com, news that you would be able to play as the 1992 Dream Team in NBA2K13 came along with some more information on the already announced Signature Skills. In addition to the Brick Wall and Floor General skills we learned about in Samit Sakar’s preview for Polygon, IGN’s Ryan McCaffrey tells us that we can:
Expect upwards of 30 of them total, with each player having up to five of the passive abilities. Clutch, Deadeye, Lockdown Defender, and others will make the stars just a little more accurate to their real-life counterparts, and in My Player you’ll be able to develop them with your custom avatar.So that’s five skills announced, but that leaves 25 or more that we don’t yet know about. Keeping in mind the approach that games like FIFA have taken to adding specialized skills for individual players, what are some of the other possible skills for NBA2K13 to include and how might they be implemented?
Read More - NBA 2K13: Prospective Signature Skills
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
01:20 PM - August 15, 2012. Posted by RaychelSnr. Written by Steve McPherson
With details of NBA2K13 beginning to surface, it’s easy to get excited about the game’s Oct. 2 release date at this point.
But let's not live in the future so much just yet, we still have NBA 2K12 keep us company for a month and a half. If you have been playing NBA 2K12 for the past 10 months or so, you likely have done just about all it is that you want to do with the game, so it begs the question: How can we get more out of our copies of NBA2K12?
Whether you’ve played NBA 2K12 a lot or a little, the My Player mode provides a lot of options for challenges and different play-styles that can help you get more out of a game that’s nearly a year old.
Read More - How To Get The Most Out Of NBA 2K12 In The Next 48 Days
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