NBA 2K16: The Third Rise to the Next-Gen Era

Hey, what up guys. It's Tavon here. It's about to be my first blog with this one. I'm ready to share you a story about NBA 2K. As all of you have known just recently, NBA 2K20 news has been coming in dumpster fire. Anthony Davis has been revealed as the standard cover athlete, Dwyane Wade has been revealed as the Legend Edition cover athlete, and the first trailer for NBA 2K20 just came out. While all of us are excited for NBA 2K20, which will come out 2 months from now on September 6, I want to go back to NBA 2K games before this to see how these last 4 games have led us to this point. I would love to start off with NBA 2K14, but I only played the last-gen version and never got to experience it on the PS4 or Xbox One. I'll start off with NBA 2K16, because that's the first time I've ever played a next-gen 2K. It would be my first personal 2K because I have 2K11, but that was from my cousin. So, yeah, we're gonna start off with NBA 2K16 cuz that's where my experience with next-gen 2Ks began, and to look at the evolution of 2K from here to later on from my experience makes it a lot cooler of how we got here. So, let's begin this.

When I first got this game, I was already excited about playing this game. I had already seen Blacktop videos of the game on Youtube. It looked very good to play. So I got the game in the Xbox One, in which I was already eager to play. When the intro popped up, Man, it was so awesome. To have the intro with the cover athletes Anthony Davis, James Harden, and Steph Curry, alongside Michael Jordan, who was the Special Edition cover athlete of the game before they called Special Editions Legend Editions, was such a moment to remember. The generic who is your Myplayer (even tho he's not like your Myplayer you're gonna make if you want) dunking as he is on many teams was just amazing. It was like this game was gonna be the best 2K ever. It was like it would be even better than 2K11. The intro really felt like that more was to come for the future of NBA 2K.

After the intro, you will then be heading to a screen that will have you enter your birthday, of course another screen entering your email address and agreeing to the terms for you to play online, and finally MyPlayer, where you create your MyPlayer for Mycareer. Once you get pass that, you go into the main menu. This is actually a very good menu. The jumbotron showing NBA Players and Anthony Davis,James Harden, Steph Curry, and Michael Jordan dribbling and shooting the ball while navigating the menu was just spectacular.

The Gameplay is Amazing. It was so fluid and very easy easy to control. The mere fact that I can dunk easily made the gameplay truly felt like it was better than 2K11.To make things more better, this game had many improvements. The movement was more fluid. The shooting was more fluid. The passing was more fluid. There would even be a new Post Button. TBH, when playing NBA 2K11, the controls were at least a little bit too complex to use every bit of them and I was having fun, so I couldn't been able to use the Post that much in 2K11. But on 2K16, the Post with the Left Trigger was so easy to use. It had new Pass controls as well to use. All of these gameplay improvements made me stick to this game being the best 2K ever. The Graphics were amazing as well. I had never seen NBA 2K like this before, and with that being said, these graphics make this game look like it would be the best 2K ever.

We, of course, know Play Now is great. It's a quick game of NBA basketball, and it performs well, making it one of the best modes in the game.

My personal favorite mode when playing this game. Blacktop. I love Blacktop from 2K13. The gameplay, the court, even the soundtrack playing while I'm dunking in the game. Those were fun times, and when I had 2K16, the mode would be even more fun. The improved Gameplay made it a really special Blacktop. I loved the green court. It was awesome. What was even more fun was this addition that I had dreamed of when playing Blacktop on 2K13. This may have been in 2K14 and 2K15 (let me know if it is) but custom sliders can be in Blacktop. I remember playing 2K13's Blacktop and it can be the most sh!**y experience ever for a street basketball mode. I would always feel like the game switched on Hall of Fame, even tho I actually had it on Rookie and had custom sliders. Therefore, I would have to start the whole game over cuz Blacktop doesn't make any sense. 2K16 fixes that problem by having custom sliders and the difficulty setting in the mode and it was more enjoyable than I've ever played before.

MyLeague was another great mode that I loved. Unfortunately, I've never played a full season of MyLeague but I always loved it for how many features it has. I loved the Team Relocation Feature. I love that you can change team's cities, logos, colors, names, arenas, and uniforms. It was so amazing to see this feature and to see this made me want to enjoy this mode and say this is the best mode in the game.

And of course, we have MyCareer. Now, a lot of y'all may have not liked the story, but I sure have. It was such a good experience. To play at high school and college before eventually going to the NBA by being drafted in the NBA Draft was a incredible journey. From the story to the gameplay, this MyCareer goes down as one of the best MyCareers in the series.

Even tho I loved this game at the time, I stumbled across some issues that made me feel like "yeah, this is kinda bad, I hope they do better next time".

#1 The Team Relocation feature is kinda bad

I like the Team Relocation feature. I really do. This game is the first to have this feature, making it a blessing. But there's a issue that 2K has never fixed and the biggest problem with this feature is that nobody else had the time or eye to catch this issue but me. There's this glitch in Myleague where if you go to Create Uniform, choose custom colors and save it and go to Team Branding, in Team Colors, the team you customized's color swatch will change. What? I never wanted the color swatch to change. In Team Branding, your team has two color swatches: one next to the teams it's next to in alphabetical order and one that's next to the 76ers and Wizards. In Create Uniform, however, your team has one color swatch. Why do you have different number of color swatches with these two menus?! Why isn't there an option to create a color swatch, so that this glitch never happened?! It's one of the most underrated issues of the series because the community never seen this issue. So if 2K can just put a Team Relocation Custom Team Colors Creator in 2K20, this issue will completely go away.

#2. Contracts are ass in this game

In Free Agency in MyLeague, you pick a player to offer a contract to. You can determine how much money they get. However, if you thought MyLeague gave you complete control, sorry, this one pissed me off so bad, and you'll feel like that with what I'm about to say. When trying to offer a star player a minimum contract, he will always decline. It doesn't make any sense. I tried to solve this with the ambition attributes but they do ABSOLUTELY NOTHING at all to stop this. The worst part of this is that there's no way to get rid of player interest. This issue is one of the many reasons why I could never play a full season of MyLeague, making the game and the mode rather sloppy thanks to this bullshit!

#3. Alley Oops are terrible in this game

Despite the new controls, in which double pressing Triangle or Y makes you do a alley-oop, it's too damn hard to do a alley-oop. You can only do it on a fast break. There's no way to select the guy who you want to lob it to, also making this game shitty with this crap!

#4. The roster editing is goodish, but hell

Custom rosters are good in this game. You can do whatever you want with the teams in these rosters. But there's a problem. It's very limitated. You have to follow the CBA where you can only keep a minimum of 13 players on the roster, which means if you want to move legends in MyLeague, you gonna have to make a player and copy him to teams and waive players or trade a lot and hope you remember the teams before you trade well, cuz you can only waive 2 players and that's really sucky.

So to sum things off, NBA 2K16 had a good run for all of NBA 2K. However there were some issues that made it feel rather stale than when I was excited about this game. It's not a bad game, but it's not a good game either. It's an okay game. It was good at the time and if there were more good than bad in this game, it could have been the best 2K ever. It will always be fun to have memories of this game... til the next 2K. So, I like to thank you guys for viewing my first ever blog. I'm Tavon and I'll see you guys later.