What’s happening, good folks? Monday is back up in our faces again after a quiet weekend. The world’s eyes are on the World Cup, but due to Tech Editor Chris Jarrard forgetting to buy a copy of FIFA 18 to stream for today’s Happy Hour, we will instead suffer through the tale of his journey to be the NBA’s top basketball star. The fun begins at 7:15 PM ET (4:15 PM PT) on the Official Shacknews Twitch Channel.
Those who are willing to endure this tomfoolery will notice that the gameplay is from NBA 2K15, rather than the current NBA 2K18. Chris did purchase 2K18 for the purposes of streaming, but found the structure and restrictions placed by the game are designed to overwhelm the player with unskippable misery so that microtransactions will be purchased to ease the pain. He was not willing to give Take Two an additional $40 to skip otherwise unskippable cutscenes, so we ended up with NBA 2K15.
Sadly, Take Two killed the servers for NBA 2K15 a couple of years ago, so many of the customization and progression features of the game are lost forever. This is also a real shame, as it puts a hard limit on how long a buyer can enjoy a game. Unfortunately, Chris had a save file in NBA 2K15 that was corrupted by the game since the servers were shut down and the file needed server authentication to function, so the basketball story must go all the way back to the beginning. Thus today’s viewers will witness the figurative birth of a basketball god borns from the ashes of scummy business practices that are anti-consumer. Video games, y’all.
Source: Shacknews Happy Hour: The Story of 2K Crabs