See I promised I’d be back today. I know, I bet you’ve missed me. I’ve been busy for a few days making some of the money stuff my landlord and shops seem to be so keen on, but now I have some time to actually talk to you, my adoring fans. I’m not sure that you actually adore me, but I’ve yet to receive any hate mail so adoration seems the logical option. Anyway now that we’ve decided I’m universally loved, let’s get onto today’s topic of choice – sports games.
Now I’ll be perfectly honest, I’m not the sportiest person in the world. My rather rotund figure does not fit in well in the sporting world, and to be honest I’m not all that big into this whole exercise thing. It doesn’t fit well with my deep love of laziness. However sporting games are an entirely different thing. Sure I may not actually understand every nuance of football, and I do get beaten a lot, but I still love playing FIFA. With a few exceptions, such as wrestling titles, I won’t play them by myself, the whole point is going up against your friends.
There are very few genres I can say I genuinely love, but sport games of all shapes and sizes easily make my list. FIFA is great to go up against friends with your favourite club, and games like NBA and NHL titles let me have fun with a sport I don’t see a lot of in the UK. The only big title missing from my history with the genre is Madden. Oddly I’ve never played an iteration of the iconic American Football title, although perhaps that’s because I don’t really understand the sport anyway.
There is however the one flaw with sports games, the one that everyone points out when it comes to release season. Yearly schedules pretty much preclude any revolution in any of the titles, mostly put out by EA Sports. A year is not an awful lot of time to completely overhaul a game’s engine to unleash any sort of stunning new visuals or game mechanics. So many of the titles just get labelled, perhaps fairly, as roster updates. While there are always some incremental updates, and occasionally a development team manage to pull off something amazing, in general some of the games do feel like no real progress is being made.
So do you love or hate sports games? Do you buy a franchise every year, or do you avoid them like the plague? And what about the yearly release schedule? Should titles be spaced out more? Perhaps DLC updates to titles would serve consumers better than the current schedule.