For the last 11-years I was the Xbox Guide / Expert for
About.com and a big part of my job was reviewing pretty much anything and
everything, which meant reviewing sports games every year. Now, I’m not a typical tech geek who looks
down on sports games and holds a grudge against sports in general because the
jocks were jerks to me in high school – actually, I got along pretty well with
everyone – like so many in gaming communities seem to be. I love sports. I played sports. I like
watching them. I like playing sports
games. In spite of my genuine love of
sports, however, reviewing yearly sports games is the actual goddamn worst.
Sports games get a bad reputation among cynical gaming nerds
as being little more than roster updates with no effort put into them and
they’re the same year after year, but in reality that isn’t true at all. Seemingly small gameplay tweaks can actually
make a huge difference out on the field.
Presentation changes matter. New
modes matter. And, yes, roster updates
matter. To an outsider that doesn’t
like sports and doesn’t care about sports games anyway, sure, it can seem like
the games don’t change much. But to
sports fans and people who spend a lot of time with these games, they change
fairly significantly from year to year.
There are exceptions, such as generational changes where EA takes two
years to put back in all of the features they had last gen into the new gen
version, but for the most part the newest release is almost always an
improvement over the previous release.
That is part of what makes reviewing them so hard,
though. When every new release each
year is the best football game or best soccer game or best basketball game
ever, it makes your glowing praise of last year’s entry seem really, really
stupid. And your old reviews look
especially dumb when you go on and on about how new sports games finally fix
something, or finally add some key feature, and how this new entry makes last
year’s game look like a huge pile of crap despite the fact you said the same
stuff last year and slapped the exact same score onto it. Every Madden review, for example, has called
each new entry a “return to form” for about a decade now. The hyperbole is ridiculous.
Reviewing sports games especially stings when a game is out
for a few weeks and flaws you didn’t even notice or think about start popping
up. Newly discovered online playcalling
exploits or glitches or stat tracking breaking after 27 seasons or something
you didn’t have time to fully explore make you look back on your glowing review
with extreme regret. This is a no win
situation, though. You only have a
limited amount of time to review something, so you might play through a full
season or two and give all of the modes a try before writing your review and
simply not notice or experience the flaws that more dedicated players who spend
a lot more time with the game might find.
These super fans drive the public perception of a game because they
“know what they’re talking about”, but the fact is that the vast majority of
players will probably have a similar experience that the reviewer did and will
think the game is fine.
This pattern is frustrating as a reviewer because you’re
still thinking, “Well, I honestly DO think this year’s game is better than last
year’s!” and you know from experience that most players won’t notice and
probably shouldn’t care about issues brought up by super fans. The damage has been done, though. Public perception turns. This year’s game “sucks”, your positive review
seems dumb and hyperbolic, and the cycle repeats itself next year.
Don’t even get me started on sports where there is more than
one game released each year. Not only
are you struggling with not painting yourself into a corner with glowing
hyperbole every year, but you also have to compare and contrast two games that
are 90% identical when it comes to features and modes and gameplay. It is just a huge pain in the ass to write
separate reviews when the games are mostly the same. Granted, reviewing NBA Live versus NBA 2K isn’t as much of an
issue because NBA Live is objectively awful compared to 2K and it is easy to
explain why, but doing something like FIFA and Pro Evolution Soccer
back-to-back is a nightmare (especially the last couple of years when both have
been very good).
Forgive my ranting, but it feels good to get all of this off
of my chest after dealing with it for 11-years. The nice thing about making PSXBoxIndies is that I don’t have to
worry about most of it anymore. I’m
still probably going to play these games – at the very least Madden and NHL and
FIFA thanks to EA Access – but I don’t have to review them, and that is a huge
relief.
Bonus story time! I
was once offered a freelance job covering sports videogames for ESPN.com
several years ago. I turned it down for
largely the same reasons featured in this editorial. I love sports and playing sports games, but writing about them is
the goddamn worst.
