The holidays have ended. So too have the days when families and relatives could sit down and enjoy a sports video game together.

Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years have, in the Young family, seen sports games like RBI Baseball, NBA Jam and Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey bring just as much excitement to the living room as plates full of turkey, mashed potatoes and dinner rolls.

The current menu of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sports games, disappointingly, contains no title capable of carrying on this tradition. Even in a room full of sports-loving, tech-savvy people, these $400 and $500 entertainment systems currently function best as a Netflix or Blu-Ray player.
 

Though basketball fans now have two distinct games to choose from, neither option is anywhere near as accessible as Double Dribble was in the 1980s, NBA Jam was throughout the 1990s or NBA Street was during the 2000s.

Despite most Americans' love of professional football, handing them a controller and inviting them to play Madden NFL 25 is akin to giving them a pencil and asking them to pass a 19th Century U.S. History exam.

Over the years, EA Tiburon has tried to make Madden less arcane by adding features like GameFlow, auto sprint, auto strafe, ball hawk and heat seeker tackling. But when GameFlow calls a draw play on 3rd and 7, and the player is struggling to control his runner's awkward True Step Locomotion -- without even touching the Highlight Stick, the Precision Modifier or the sprint button -- Madden NFL 25 has about as much chance of winning over new fans as the expansion-era Cleveland Browns.

Likewise, no amount of computer assistance is going to make FIFA 14 approachable to newcomers, so long as the game requires four different buttons and a meter mini-game to simply kick a ball.
 

Of the major sports franchises, Electronic Arts' NHL series is the only one that presently offers outsiders an inviting experience.

Its dual-joystick controls are immediately intuitive; its action is fast and violent; once offside, icing and penalties are disabled, there are no confusing rules to disrupt play, aside from good old fashioned fist fights.

Throughout the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era, NHL has been my go-to sports title for entertaining people outside my PSN and XBL Friend Lists.

Barring the unlikely announcement of any new arcade games in the spring or the summer, NHL 15 will likely continue that title reign once the series transitions onto PlayStation 4 and Xbox One this fall.
 

Too much food has been eaten, and next to me on the couch, I notice a cousin inspecting a stray NBA Live 14 case, left open under the entertainment center.

He asks me if it's as much fun as the old one, likely recalling the Christmas we hooked up a multitap to the Super Nintendo and played NBA Live 95 until sundown.

Not wanting to damage that memory, I inform him that the new game is, "a lot more complicated, and not nearly as fun."