The Friday Five is a feature that I post every Friday in which I give my thoughts on a topic that’s related to basketball video games, the real NBA or another area of interest to our community, either as a list of five items or in the form of a Top 5 countdown. This is a central discussion thread for the feature, in which I invite you to post any feedback along with your responses to each column's topic. A link to the latest article can always be found here in the first post, along with a link to the complete archive.
Latest Feature
The Friday Five: 5 Conceptual Mistakes Basketball Games Made
Game design isn’t as easy as some people believe it to be. Programming is far from entering instructions in plain English, with many technological challenges that must be overcome. It’s also impossible to cater to everyone’s tastes and preferences, and what might seem like a good idea on paper may not work out as well as hoped when it comes to fruition. For the most part, no one is trying to make a bad video game. It’s just that some concepts don’t pan out, there’s not enough time or adequate resources, ambitious plans set the bar too high, or perhaps a combination thereof.
At the same time, some basketball games have left us wondering what the developers were thinking when it comes to an approach or design choice. There may be some small merit to an idea, but it’s still bewildering that it survived the planning stages, or preliminary proof of concept testing. In all fairness, there are other ideas that seemed good to us as well, until the games were in our hands and we realised that it wasn’t quite what we wanted after all. These are the conceptual mistakes that held games back from being as good as they could and should have been. Hindsight is 20/20 of course, but again, a few of these examples were waving red flags from the beginning.