Gaming off the Beaten Path

  I'm going to keep going with my tradition of opening the year with an old sports game. But this time, I'm going to go about it a little bit differently. Usually I go with either an old title in a current series or I check out a title from a once prominent sports series that died out. I mean, that was kind of supposed to be the whole point of this thing when I started. But after last year, where I started looking more into titles on obscure consoles, I found myself looking for sports games in other places. While it was somewhat difficult to find more mainline sports titles on these systems, there were certainly plenty of other examples to be found. For better or worse, most of these tend to be more arcade style sports games, they don't really try to accurately simulate the sports they represent. I personally think this tends to lead to better results for older sports titles. It was really hard to reproduce the feel of an actual sport on a 3rd, 4th or even 5th generation co...

  Let's make it a tradition. Once again, we're kicking off a new year with an old sports game. It almost feels wrong not to jump into some of the older Madden games, considering his unfortunate passing a few weeks ago. John Madden truly did transcend football and he deserves a lot of credit for introducing the game to people who otherwise wouldn't have cared in the slightest. The Madden titles weren't the first sports games, not by a longshot, but they are the most culturally relevant. Now, of course, EA essentially has a monopoly on the video game football market. But that wasn't always the case. I've already talked about Sony's NFL Gameday and the Tecmo Bowl series is considered classic for good reason. But neither of those series', or any of the countless other football titles on the market, really ever made the folks at EA sweat. They were content to compete with these other franchises, believing they had the superior product. Sometimes they were rig...