Suns.com Retrospectives: NBA Live 95 & NBA Live 95 vs. NBA Jam
Fri Mar 20, 2015 10:12 am
From the main page:
(For those who are unaware, we're also preparing our own 20th Anniversary of NBA Live content, which will include our own retrospectives like these.)
Definitely a fun trip back in time for me. If you compare NBA Live 95 to NBA Showdown, EA's game from the year before, it's one of the biggest leaps in a single year for a basketball video game. It's obviously outdated, but Live 95 does hold up surprisingly well if you go back and play it, and approach it as you would a more modern game, in terms of being more realistic and strategic in your style of play. It's well worth dusting off every once in a while.
I'm a huge Jam fan as well, though Tournament Edition was my release of choice.
The official website of the Phoenix Suns has posted a retrospective of NBA Live 95, with author Ben York remembering it fondly as "the greatest basketball video game of all-time". He talks about playing the Super Nintendo version of the game with his brother for hours upon hours from May to August 1995, and discusses just how impressive NBA Live 95 was for its time; an assessment that I for one certainly agree with.
In another piece, York debates Greg Esposito as to which 90s basketball game was better: the sim-oriented NBA Live 95, or the arcade-oriented NBA Jam. For those who of us who remember playing both games back in the day, it's a fun trip down memory lane. For younger basketball gamers, it will hopefully prove to be an interesting look back at a time when basketball games really started to improve.
(For those who are unaware, we're also preparing our own 20th Anniversary of NBA Live content, which will include our own retrospectives like these.)
Definitely a fun trip back in time for me. If you compare NBA Live 95 to NBA Showdown, EA's game from the year before, it's one of the biggest leaps in a single year for a basketball video game. It's obviously outdated, but Live 95 does hold up surprisingly well if you go back and play it, and approach it as you would a more modern game, in terms of being more realistic and strategic in your style of play. It's well worth dusting off every once in a while.
I'm a huge Jam fan as well, though Tournament Edition was my release of choice.