NBA Live 2003 - Cincinatti Royals vs Philadelphia Warriors, 1961-62

Philadelphia Warriors (now Golden State Warriors) vs Cincinatti Royals (now Sacramento Kings) from the 1961-62 season, featuring the two best overall player seasons in the games history (Oscar Robertson and Wilt Chamberlain). To come: I'm going to do a Philadelphia Warriors vs New York Knicks recreation of Chamberlain's 100 points, or as many as I can score in 4 minutes to fit on YouTube (each video winds up being about twice that length with videos and delays)...

This is from my player conversions. I put a database of all time NBA stats through a spreadsheet and was able to come up with files for every season in NBA history. Around 4,000 players, each averaging about 5 years in the NBA, making around 20,000 individual player seasons.

A note about this game: it took a while for me to get a competitive Philadelphia score on All-Star setting. It is remarkably easy to shut down Wilt Chamberlain in NBA Live 2003. If you double team him, the CPU will mostly pass off to Paul Arizin who will do most of the scoring if you leave the guards open and able to penetrate to the basket. However, if you stop both, the CPU team can shoot some pretty low numbers. I decided to back off Wilt a bit for this video and he scored big. IMO, Oscar Robertson is the easier player to score with, you probably will be able to hit 100 easier with him than Chamberlain. In Superstar, all of these seasons become much more competitive and 'real'-like, but free throws are far too unrealistically difficult (then again, that somehow is made up for the over abundance of 3 point plays in the game).

I took months to work out the formulas, but there are many problems. One is I didn't adjust the values to reflect the NBA Live 2003 game engine, afterall the accuracy of the simulation is going to differ game to game/player by player and I wanted to convert the seasons to other NBA Lives (got a conversion process worked out for 2004, 2005 and 2006) so I wanted to keep the values as neutral as possible.

There is little accomodation, all player ratings are weighted between 0 (all time lowest record in NBA history) and 99 (all time best), which also means something like dribbling is weak for most players (I think Tyrone Bogues has the best). It will not give extremely accurate game results, but I did create a recalculation spreadsheet that should be able to set lower and upper thresholds for ratings and reprocess everything to do with the calculations yourself (even though it's slow and requires an old version of Open Office). For NBA Live 2004 and 2005, I've come up with a calibration spreadsheet for the realism settings based on game output stats, I hope to also implement a guide for the fields in this 'recalculation' spreadsheet for 2003. It is difficult to go back to these seasons in NBA Live 2003, they're better in the later games with the realism settings.

Another problem is I based the skill ratings on per game stats. I originally wanted it to be a repeat of history, not a reinvention. I wanted incentive to play the right players, I considered this a coach value. Physical values are per 48 minute, though, such as jumping, speed and strength. Not ideal, but per 48 minute stats became unworkable due to the complex nature of the spreadsheet functions and it's a cross between the two.

Players are slowed down significantly, however, this does not really effect the game results. Slowing down players in none of the NBA Live games has had any significant effect on reducing scoring rate, the player still takes almost as many shots, it only effects game play. This will not be as fun to play. Also, unless the players accompanied the original game, the other players have random skin colours, no faces and are by default restricted to layups. This is mainly a patch for the fanatics who want to try and simulate historical NBA seasons, not necessarily about squeezing the most from the gameplay.

The present version is available for download here (however, keep in mind I want to work on the Calibration stuff relevant to NBA Live 2003):

http://rapidshare.com/files/194205800/HistoricRostersR2m4c.exe

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• Oscar Robertson

[videoclubman]

Is there any solution for the black faces?

[dwayne2005]

@videoclubman I can insert pre-designated 'random' faces for each of the players. This video is old. I can get the gameplay far more realistic than here.

[dazzitboy]

wrong jersey for the warriors though

[dwayne2005]

No new graphics, just working on all the player.dbf files and player ratings. This was a very early video, so the ratings are exaggerated. I've come up with a method of 'ranging' the values to get more accurate stats and more palatable gameplay. My project is just 20,000 player ratings and giving them an unbiased range of 0-99, that can be altered to suit game (can be converted to all PC Live's from 2000-06) and playing style. The real stats are preserved so it can be redone.

[dazzitboy]

lol

all i said that if it were the philadelphia warriors, they would be wearing white. that's their san francisco warriors jersey

[dwayne2005]

I was just using as close to their 'historic' uniform the game had, I don't remember if it was a Philadelphia one or a Golden State one. The Cincinatti Royals are even using their Sacramento Kings uniform.

[gabrieldck]

Can you re-upload the "Historic Rosters" pack for NBA Live 2003? The file in Rapidshare is missed.

[CutterHistorical]

Oh so this is for the PC? Excellent work

[ShaMoney347]

oh man that look bad

[dariushenry88]

Wow, this is cool. Their heads are wierd, but it's still great. Every year, it seems like NBA Live has less legends. What I like to do is put all the legends that are avaliable to play and put them to their teams (and/or other teams). When I was playing 09, there less legends than before. Legends like Paul Arizins and George Yardley wasn't there and I was hughly disappointed.

[dazzitboy]

i'm much more familiar with the Golden State Warriors, not the Philadelphia Warriors. Actually, you have the San Francisco Warriors jerseys on. If you notice that the backs are cable cars with their numbers.