Sports Sims.

Sports sims have never really done it for me. International Soccer on the C64 was fun, but back then being able to play a relatively complex team game at home was a new and exciting experience. That was probably due to the fact that the last sports sims I'd played were the C64 Pong versions of hockey and soccer. Well, by soccer I mean what most of you call football... Hey, I'm an Aussie OK?

(So why was International Soccer called International Soccer then, eh. EH?)

Never having owned an Atari VCS, I missed out on any sports sims it might have had. I was still stuck with Pong when everyone else was playing Space Invaders and Pac-Man at home. Pong Hockey and Pong Soccer were basically the same game, except Hockey had three players on each team and Soccer had five. Completely unlike real life, obviously. But it was all I had.

Not Pong Hockey, but the closest we could find. Oh, and by the
way, don't do a Google Image Search for ‘pong hockey’ at work.
Or if you do, don't go to page 2.

At the time, the thing that amazed me most about International Soccer was the way the players moved independently of each other. I was used to my players all moving in a bizarre constant, table football-style set formation. The second most amazing thing was the fact that they could move left and right and not just up and down.

I don't remember many more sports sims on the 64, but then I didn't really go looking for them. I do remember a couple of amusing days I had with the copy of Graham Gooch's Cricket my mate Dave Barbara stuck down his pants in a spontaneous and completely out of character shoplifting episode. But that's about all.

So, as I said earlier, sports sims have never really done it for me.

But what especially doesn't appeal are the endless EA/FIFA/Madden/whatever releases, re-releases and re-re-releases.

I totally understand why developers keep churning them out. There’s a handy target audience – football must be the most popular game in the world. And there are potentially two-hundred million-odd Americans and maybe even a few Canadians to flog the latest version of Madden NFL to. So, as long as the punters are willing enough to keep one or two sports games in the top ten all year round (and three or four at Christmas), it makes sense to keep churning 'em out. What's less understandable is the more, er, esoteric sports-related releases that get developed.

Recently, in Australia, EA released Rugby League 2004. Now, there aren't exactly a huge number of us Aussies here to start with (no jokes about them all hanging out in Aussie-themed pubs in London, please). Only about half of us live in States where rugby league is taken seriously – and you can rule out half of them because they’re girls. A good percentage of those left are probably too young or too old to play video games*, and if you allow for the fact that most young Australians are hanging out in Aussie-themed pubs in London, just who is going to buy it?

I don't think that the subsequent New Zealand release would help build the business case either.

Centrifuge montage shot – big rugby men.

There have also been a couple of Australian Football (AFL) games released over here. For those of you that don't know, AFL involves two teams of fit, pretty, young men trying to kick an almost-but-not-quite rugby shaped ball between four posts. Oh, and kill each other in the process. Apparently it's a bit like Gaelic Football. In fact, it's more like Speedball 2 without the armour. AFL is played pretty much wherever Rugby League isn't. In Australia, that is.

So, I imagine that Rugby League and AFL games don't have much chance of getting a widespread European or American release. Neither would a video game based on Gaelic Football, you'd reckon. But apparently there is a Gaelic Football game out for the PS2. Or there are plans for one, something like that.

So, what next? A game based on synchronised swimming? It's at the Olympics, so it must a sport. What about that other Irish game – Hurling or Curling or whatever? How about trainspotting? If synchronised swimming is a sport then trainspotting might as well be. In fact, our own Ahchay has already put together a brilliant design doco for a trainspotting game (actually, he just ripped off the idea from Stuart Campbell – but don't tell anyone, eh?)

Cunning feets. Also, impressive vaginas.

Now that I think of it, synchronised swimming would have worked as a Pong-based game. They're supposed to move in unison. Might be a tad easy, though. Not to mention repetitive ("What move shall we do now?"… "I know, let's go up. And then down again.").

Synchronised Monkey Swimming in Monkey Ball 3, though…

*Actually, you're never to young or too old to play video games, but try telling my wife that.

THEMEADOWS, March 2004

Comments

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Things to 'Make' and 'Do'.

Together at last – Hurling and Gaelic Football.

Now here’s a sport we’d like to see simulated.

Google Image Search for ‘Pong Hockey’ – Page Two.

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