Video games have been around for quite some time. In fact, a sports video game called Tennis For Two can be labeled as the first video game ever. Titles like Pong, Tecmo Bowl, Intellivision (insert sport of your choice here), Baseball Stars and others all live in the hallowed halls of our minds as some of the best ever. So with over 25 years of modern gaming behind us, why do some of the best features from the past still remain in the past?

One of the biggest areas in which gaming developers are struggling to learn from previous versions deals with the presentation aspect of each sport. There is absolutely no excuse for the 2009 versions of football, basketball, baseball or hockey games to not have stellar broadcast-style presentation throughout the game. At one point developers seemed to be picking up on the cut-scene moments from Tecmo Bowl and NES Play Action Football and running with them, but now have presently fumbled that ball once again. As gamers, we are now treated to sub-par cycling of replays with the option to look at stats during halftimes in some games.

Now I ask you to look back to the summer of 2004 when we were presented with Take Two’s football masterpiece NFL 2K5, which had a stellar halftime show that recapped the first half nicely. The presentation was believable enough that if you were to close your eyes, you’d think you were actually listening to a halftime break during a real NFL game. The same game also featured a weekly wrap-up show that included highlights from around the league and television style commentary. Take Two wasn’t the only company offering stylized presentation either. Once upon a time, Madden even gave us ugly digitized cheerleaders to look at during halftime.

Seriously though, anyone else remember the scores from around the league scrolling across the bottom of the screen as you played your franchise game in earlier versions of Madden? I can distinctly recall glancing at the Rams score in Week 16 of my 49ers franchise more than my own score. Is it too much to ask to be informed by the commentators in the eighth inning of my baseball game that the team trailing me by one game in the division just won their game? This type of immersion should be the standard -- not the exception -- with the games on the market today.

Another area is the all encompassing umbrella I’ll refer to as gameplay features. Sports games should be fun to play in whatever capacity they present themselves. The original Smackdown had a gameplay element that hasn’t been featured in another version since. I’m referring to an actual two-player season/career mode. I remember many late nights where I battled with my buddy for the Intercontinental strap, just hoping the computer would see fit to rank me high enough to garner a shot at the World Championship Belt. Tiger Woods also featured the option to bring a friend along in your season/career and play the rounds against you -- it has been phased out over time. Why hasn’t a developer seen fit to give us an online version of this? Was I imagining how much fun it was vying against my friends for championship gold?

I’m also a huge fan of the expansion element in video games. Is there a more rewarding feeling than taking a team you have built -- from the ground up since day one -- all the way to a World Series or a Super Bowl victory? Acclaim’s All-Star Baseball series had one of the best expansion modes I’ve ever played in a console game, and it even mirrored some of the same elements found in Out of the Park’s expansion system.

I also remember taking the Houston Texans and being able to change their names to the Las Vegas Outlaws, before then building one the most feared defensive units in NFL history. Now granted, that this was an exception due to Houston coming into the league in 2002, but why couldn’t this type of feature work? Nearly all the old games featured some type of “create a team” feature, whether it was Baseball Stars or Baseball Simulator 1.000.

I also find it amusing that we have to beg for FCS schools when previous versions of NCAA Football featured them. Believe it or not, Super Play Action Football for the SNES actually allowed you to play with high school teams. Why hasn’t the NCAA Football series progressed to the point where there is an option to play/watch a star recruit’s high school all-star game?

There are reasons College Hoops 2K8 is rated as high as it is among sports games. Stellar presentation…check! Fun to play…check! Four-player Legacy Mode…check! Create-a-school…check! Create-a-play…check! Ability to play basketball with high school recruits…check! Unparalleled depth and immersion…check! The game even featured dramatic moments from the future if you played it long enough. Coach K retiring from coaching college basketball shakes up the 2K8 world as much as it would in real life. I’m certain I’m not alone in saying that College Hoops 2K8 is exactly the type of game developers should be looking at in retrospect and applying to sports games of today. Leave it to me to quote a supermodel in closing, but as Petra Nemcova said, “Learn from the past, look to the future (2010!!), but live (or play) in the present.”

What other elements would you like to see make a return(or be rehashed) in sports games?