I got asked in a comment section the other day about what sports games I play. The reason for them asking this was that I seem to have very strong opinions about videogames and I don't know if they were trolling or not, but they wanted to know what sport video games I play.
Well the short answer is I don't really play sport games. I used to. But these days I feel like most games are extremely complicated seeing as how we have 27 buttons on our controllers now and back when I started gaming we had 1 (The Atari 2600 joystick.)
But there was a period of time that I did play some sport games, and I'd like to tell you about them seeing as how most of them were probably from before you were alive.
The first one that really took a bunch of my time was Double-Dribble on the NES. This would have been released around 1986 or so and this was a point in my life that I was kind of forced, by school and the fact that my family household didn't have cable, to be about as in to basketball as I would ever be in my life.
This game involved two buttons because that was all the buttons the NES controller had on it. I learned by watching and episode of Family Guy that if you take a 3 pointer from the top of the key on the right side of the court, you cannot miss. I never knew that
In the late 80's and early 90's Sega dominated the US gaming market with the Genesis. It was at that time that they heavily invested in some pretty good sports games and one of them was Joe Montana Football. Again, I wasn't much of a sports fan and barely knew who most of the players were. But since the Genesis only had 3 buttons I found it manageable even though when it came to play selection, I really had no idea what would work and what wouldn't. I would later find out how important this part of the strategy actually is when a teenage friend of mine who was a star on the football team played against me and I was just dumbfounded at how instantly good he was at it.
I played the crap out of this game and loved it. It was great because a lot of my friends played it as well and the head-to-head was a lot of fun.
Things mostly got too complicated for me after this generation of consoles though, although one thing accidentally became a favorite for me and my roommates, mostly because of booze.
one of my college roomates was from New England and he was a huge hockey fan. I was a huge videogame fan and one day he borrowed (and I think never returned) NHL 2001 from a friend of his who I hope became and ex-friend due to his bad borrowing practices.
We played this a lot and drank a lot of beer. We created custom characters and had stats that we would keep. We tried and mostly failed to get our buddies involved in tournaments and I think I was just a victim of the time because the was not really in my wheelhouse as far as games were concerned. The PS1 had 8 buttons on it but this game didn't really use all of them. If you tried to use all of them mostly you would just get into a fist-fight (on the screen) and that was a huge part of the fun as well. I think I got better at the fighting part of the game than I ever got at any strategy.
My strategy was to go for something I learned is called a "one-timer" and beyond that I was mostly trying to punch the other team in the face when they had the puck. This worked some times.
My roommate could skate backwards on roller-blades and do circles in the parking lot. He played hockey a lot growing up. I learned a lot from him and am very glad that I ended up randomly meeting him at a party and then later sharing a house with one other dude (who was lame.)
There were other games that I played and one of them was even football (the one that US people call "soccer") but I was never really into them. I mean that I would never play any of them had it not been for either lack of other options at the time or the people that I knew that wanted to play them such as my roommates.
Everyone has different tastes and that is what makes the world interesting. But for me, sports games are basically the ones that are LEAST likely to interest me because I am not all that interested in sports for the most part.
I think video games, the ones that involve more than one person anyway, are dictated by how much a person can enjoy interacting with the environment. Online games just generally speaking do not appeal to me but a lot of that probably has to do with me being near 50 years old and learning how to play videogames when the notion of being online and connected to everyone was a pipe dream.
If you like sports games I am happy for you. I wish no ill will towards anyone. For me, learning 20 buttons to dribble a ball down a court is a bit too much to ask.
