Are We Too Picky? - BlyGilmore's Blog

BlyGilmore's Blog

Are We Too Picky?

Posted on March 4, 2009 at 03:15 PM.

(10)

A thread in the forums today got me to thinking. The poster, blink, makes a bold statement, saying that most of us will never be satisfied with our $60 sports game purchases.

Now I do agree that a lot of folks out there care way to much about ultimately unimportant aspects of games. Yeah, so Team X's uniforms aren't right, and I know EA can never seem to figure out that Player A wears high-tops and not medium cut cleats.

Ultimately, though, I think this is a relatively small portion of the sports gaming population.

The rest of us? I think we're simply frustrated and a bit cynical about what we hear from the marketing gurus.

Over the past few years we have seen way too many bad games infect the genre. Almost across the board the first round of sports games were horrible - watered down versions of previous titles that were missing 75 percent of the features we had grown accustomed to. Since then we've had bad game after bad game get released.

And you can tell we aren't just a bunch of sports gaming Scrooge's who get their kicks bashing games by our reactions and posts BEFORE games are released.

We want to have a game consume us and make us feel like a kid again as we play it into the wee hours of the morning. We want to play a game that is a true diversion from all the other nonsense going on in the world. We want lose ourselves in that bomb we just hit against Sabathia or that incredible touchdown run we just had.

But all too often we stumble down the stairs on Christmas day to find Santa passed out drunk, having eaten all our cookies and deficated on our new shiny red fire engine.

And trust me - that smell doesn't come out.

For some of these franchises this year was the second or third time in a row finding the smelly fire engine. Honestly, hostile reactions are in line.

If you think about it, it has also been a while since we've had a sports video game that knocked our collective socks off. There have been no Bioshock, Little Big Planet, Gears of War or Call of Duty in the sports genre.

Check out Metacritic.com some day and you'll notice there are very few sports games in the top 20 for both the 360 and PS3. Despite sports gaming accounting for a huge portion of overall video game sales, only three titles (Forza 2, NHL 09 and The Show 08) are in the top 20 of this generation - and they're at the bottom of the list.

Hopefully, however, we are on the verge of another golden age in sports gaming. We have four franchises with very solid footing that should only move forward - NHL, NBA 2k, FIFA and The Show. Plus we have Forza 3 on the horizon.

Other games have gotten their feet firm underneath them and could join the successful titles with some good decisions.

But until that happens, don't mind us if we act out after being disappointed ... again.

Comments

# 1 rudyjuly2 @ Mar 4

I think we can be too picky but the picky ones are the loudest ones on message boards. People often don't talk about the positive stuff but rather complain about the things they don't like. I'm guilty of that but it doesn't necessarily mean I'm not happy with a game.

Some of the next gen games have been stripped down disappointments. People have a right to feel bad but I do think this year's set of sports games are on the verge of being fantastic.

My biggest beefs today are the amount of bugs and glitches when released. The availability of patches has caused a lot of this crap imo.

# 2 ChaseB @ Mar 4

Sweet spelling: "synical" HA. You're st00pid.

# 3 BlyGilmore @ Mar 4

only one letter was off ;-)

# 4 rspencer86 @ Mar 4

I would argue that we aren't picky enough. If people would stop purchasing games on release date sight unseen, developers would focus less on gimmicky features that can serve as nice "bullet points" in press releases or on the back of the game box and more on improving the actual game.

# 5 Hellisan @ Mar 4

Good article. Recently, Simbin released "Race Pro" which is a solid game aside from the fact that it has virtually no presentation or anything interesting to offer besides the racing itself. This game is almost a microcosm of the sports gaming genre as a whole. Titles on next-gen systems are always missing something.

In racing-title terms, maybe it's missing an in-car view. (Forza). Maybe it cut a little on graphics to have in-car views (Race Pro) which I'm perfectly happy with... but this game has absolutely no personality to it.

I can't remember what the phenomenon is called, but really is interesting that as games become more and more represntative of the real thing (Double Dribble to NBA2k for instance) we become more picky about the increasingly minor differences between the game and reality.

# 6 Kado456 @ Mar 4

I agree with rspencer86, I think the biggest problem with this generation of consoles is that we were forced to enter next-gen due to the greed machine called 'Microsoft". They wanted to dominate the gaming industry, and if you look at it they have succeeded. In the prior generation of consoles the "de-facto" console of choice was the PS2, now all the gaming industry is geared towards the Xbox360, save for The Show. I read an article in PLAY magezine a few months back that interviewed developers and they said that they were really just getting their head around the next-gen technology. My personal opinion is that we as gamers will have to collectively suffer for another year or two before we start seeing in the gaming industry what we are seeing in the 1st and 3rd person shooters as far revolutionary concepts let alone decent games.

# 7 stlstudios189 @ Mar 4

One thing I agree that we have the right to complain it is a $60 purchase so I want it to wow me and make it worth my day's pay I paid for it. Two I think that games are starting to get better and we may have a new golden age of sports games not seen since the Genisis days. And three with this crap economy I think we will not see a push for a new "next gen" for a while and that will only help us get even better games in the future as developers can really start to grasp these systems at such.

# 8 DubTrey1 @ Mar 4

I think we are critical and picky based on the "potential" they we look to with games in general. If some devs do better than others, then we become a bit jaded in thinking "why cant dev x,y,z do that and do it as well? It's jus the way it is IMO.

# 9 Uncle Stumpy @ Mar 7

Good article. In my opinion, sports gamers are probably the hardest to please for this reason. Sports don't allow for a lot of flexibility in creativity, sports are repitious in nature. It's impossible to re-create the wheel every year. Also, it's also the "give someone an inch, they'll take a mile" attitude, which is perfectly natural. Seriously, could we have imagined the graphics for NHL 09 back in the days of Nintendo's Ice Hockey? Also, what made the games so good back then was our imagination. If I was a 10 year old kid playing these sports games, I never would leave the house.

# 10 Beezzee @ Mar 8

I think Uncle Stumpy is on to something. The sports gaming genre has it harder than any other gaming genre to please its fans because of a few factors. The development cycle is limited thus making the year-to-year improvements more like hops & skips rather than leaps & bounds. Also, the more visually realistic the game appears, the more naturally inclined you are to notice flaws because less is left up to the imagination. Lastly, the sport that is being portrayed on the the game hasn't had any radical changes in real life that would affect the gameplay in any real meaningful way so, it's fitting that a consumer would come away feeling like they're spending $60 on a glorified roster update.