Wayback Wednesday: Mouse Controls in Basketball Games
This is Wayback Wednesday, your midweek blast from the past! From retrospectives of basketball games and their interesting features, to republished articles and looking at NBA history through the lens of the virtual hardwood, Wednesdays at the NLSC are for going back in time. This week, I’m taking a look back at mouse controls in basketball video games.
I’ve observed some unusual gatekeeping when it comes to PC gaming, basketball or otherwise. There are some people who feel that multi-button gamepads are a console idea; that a true PC gamer uses the keyboard and mouse for their controls. I’m not a fan of gatekeeping at the best of times, but this particular stance has always puzzled me. As someone who grew up playing games on PC in the 90s, joysticks, gamepads, and steering wheels were all highly desirable among hardcore gamers. Peripherals were as much a thing for PC as they were for consoles, if not more so!
Of course, by that time, mice had basically become a standard peripheral. I don’t know anyone who had a home computer in the 90s – one that was manufactured in that decade, at any rate – that wasn’t using a mouse. Beyond their use in navigating the operating system, they were also gaming devices. Indeed, the point-and-click genre of adventure games is based entirely around the use of a mouse; it’s right there in the name! With that being said, they weren’t the ideal peripheral for more action-oriented titles such as sports games, yet mouse controls were actually supported on the virtual hardwood. Let’s take a look back…way back…
When it comes to early PC basketball games, you can certainly debate the merits of keyboards vs. joysticks and gamepads. Not everyone had a gamepad – or more than one – but they definitely had a keyboard. To that end, the keyboard was once seen as a perfectly viable method of control. I can speak from personal experience here, as due to encountering issues with calibrating my gamepad in NBA Live 96, the keyboard was often my preferred device at the time. Even when it was working, I still needed the keyboard to be there as the Player 2 controls when my cousin came to stay. In short, it was important that games supported joystick and keyboard controls alike.
It’s much harder to debate the merits of mouse controls on the virtual hardwood! Nevertheless, mice have indeed been supported by various basketball video games, including the early NBA Live titles. I highly doubt that it was anyone’s first choice in those games, but there was a method to the madness. The console versions of NBA Live supported more than two players – in fact, with the Super Multitap, the Super Nintendo releases can support up to five – and since PCs had similar capabilities, the developers wanted to maintain that functionality. As per the manual, games like NBA Live 96 can actually support up to four joysticks, if you have the appropriate splitters.
I’d suggest that most people didn’t have four joysticks and a splitter though, and thus would see the control options pictured in the above screenshot: two joysticks, the keyboard, and the mouse. Once again, the keyboard was absolutely viable back then, and joystick/gamepad control was obviously popular, even in the event that you could only use two buttons. You didn’t want to be stuck using the mouse, though! There’s the old gaming trope of the controller that’s worn down, beaten up, second hand, off-brand, or otherwise inferior, being the “Player 2 Controller”; the one that the younger sibling gets. Mouse controls were the Player 2 Controller of PC basketball gaming!
As a controller in those early basketball games, the mouse functioned as you would probably expect. One button – usually the left – was assigned to shoot/jump, the other button to pass/switch, and moving the mouse moved a player in the desired direction. Similar to the “full stick” turbo option for joysticks when only two action buttons were available, rapid mouse movement was used to make players sprint. There was a sensitivity setting that you could increase if the players didn’t feel responsive enough to the movement of the mouse, or decrease if they were too out of control. It works, but the overall level of control pales in comparison to using the joystick or keyboard.
If you play those early NBA Live games using a mouse, you’re guaranteed to rack up fouls when you accidentally run into an opponent with too much force, as well as a ton of turnovers through charging calls and accidentally running out of bounds. Hats off to anyone who can master those controls and use them as effectively as a joystick, gamepad, or keyboard, but generally speaking, mouse controls were very much a last resort. Of course, that’s in the more popular and multi-platform titles such as the early NBA Live games. There have actually been PC basketball games that were designed with mouse controls in mind, including one that I’ve previously covered in a video.
That game is Michael Jordan in Flight, a PC exclusive from 1993 that starred His Airness and a roster of fictional players. There were a handful of such titles back in the 90s, including David Robinson’s Supreme Court, and the NBA Jam-inspired Barkley Shut Up and Jam!. Michael Jordan in Flight was the only PC-exclusive release however, and to that end, the only one that offers mouse control. That’s right; while a joystick is supported, it isn’t necessary, and the keyboard isn’t used outside of the frontend. In this single player game, you’re player-locked – to MJ by default, and let’s be honest here, you’re not subbing him out – with the camera always behind you.
I wouldn’t say that this unique approach resulted in a basketball game that lives up to its legendary namesake, but it’s actually more fun than it might sound. The mouse controls actually work surprisingly well thanks to the camera being fixed behind your player, the 3-on-3 halfcourt action, the lack of switching players, and the fact that it was specifically designed to use the device! There’s no sprint – rather, the players just move at a pace where picking the right angle makes driving work – so there’s no risk of barrelling into an opponent or zooming out of bounds due to an unwanted burst of speed. It’s a solid game at best, but it’s undoubtedly an intriguing gameplay concept.
Such experimentation is not unusual in basketball games outside of the traditional brand leaders such as NBA Live and NBA 2K, or even the PC ports of NBA Jam for that matter. Another PC-exclusive title that prioritised mouse controls was Nicktoons Basketball, a more casual hoops game featuring characters from various Nickelodeon cartoons circa 2004. Although it also supports keyboard and gamepad controls for a more traditional basketball gaming experience, it also used the mouse in a manner that resembles a point-and-click adventure game, or perhaps a real time strategy or RPG title. While unorthodox, it works quite well for a release intended for younger gamers.
When using the mouse in Nicktoons Basketball, you move your players by clicking on where you want them to go on the court; again, much like an RTS or RPG. You also click on the basket to attempt a shot, click on teammates to pass them the ball, click on opponents to chase them down and attempt a steal, and mash the left mouse button to win the tip-off. To those of us who are hardcore basketball fans and gamers, this may sound ridiculously basic, but once again, it’s a game that’s aimed at a much younger audience. With that in mind though, it’s a surprisingly competent title, and I can see kids who liked those early 2000s Nicktoons enjoying the simpler gameplay.
To that point, I won’t say that mouse controls are a universally bad idea for basketball video games. Clearly, it’s possible to make a solid PC hoops title based around them, and not every game related to basketball needs to be for hardcore fans. However, if we are talking about titles like NBA Live, NBA 2K, NBA Jam, and so forth – games that are either about authenticity or action-packed arcade gameplay – a mouse simply won’t cut it. As it stands, the keyboard hasn’t been an ideal PC peripheral since 2002, when NBA Live 2003 introduced Freestyle Control. Still, while the keyboard is close to impossible to use in NBA 2K25, making it work with the mouse is unthinkable!
Mind you, while mouse controls are now completely impractical for gameplay on the virtual hardwood, they are undeniably still a viable way to navigate menus. To that end, earlier NBA Live titles included scrollbars, dropdown menus, and sliders that you could click and drag in order to advance through options and settings much faster. This streamlined creating a player, as you didn’t need to cycle through the entire list of schools, or raise and lower ratings in increments of one. Global taskbar-like menus cut down on back and forth for quicker navigation. We can get by with the frontends that we have now, but I do miss having that useful mouse functionality we once had.
As far as retro gaming is concerned, mouse controls can be useful as far as emulating other peripherals. By using key mappers – including the one built into DOSBox – it’s possible to assign mouse movement and buttons to gamepad and keyboard inputs. It’s a creative way of replacing the mouse with a more suitable controller, which is handy if you want to get four users involved on a modern system. Player movement is still clunky and harder to control however, since as far as the game is concerned, the re-mapped inputs are still mimicking mouse movement. It’s not something that would be commonly done, but it’s a feasible solution if you’re in need of an extra controller.
Indeed, that pretty much sums up mouse controls in most of the hoops titles they’ve appeared in! It was handy to have them as a fallback option, but they were definitely a last resort. As the games adopted deeper and more sophisticated controls, the mouse ceased to be a viable option. At the same time, there have been some interesting PC-exclusive titles that have used it to greater effect, with Michael Jordan in Flight being the most successful. Mouse controls are an antiquated idea now and not as nostalgic as other aspects of old basketball games, but they’re still a novelty to see. If nothing else, I’m sure that many of us tried them out at least once, just to see if they clicked.
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