
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.

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.

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.