Last week, I talked about the decline of the arcade-sports genre, but this week I will be discussing how the genre can rise from the depths.

It was only 10 years and two console cycles ago when Midway's NFL Blitz franchise was so popular that it actually outsold Madden '99 across the N64 and PSone platforms.

We are also only a half-decade and one console cycle removed from a time when EA's Street brand was strong enough to have four games in its portfolio sell over a million copies -- the three NBA games and the first NFL Street

How, then, did things fall apart so rapidly for a genre that, one console cycle ago, seemed to be on the rise?

Quite simply, it seems like arcade games have just plain forgotten what it was that took them to the top.

Bring the Fantasy Elements Back Into the Game

Dan Brady, producer of 2K Sports' The Bigs, was recently quoted as saying that he wanted his company’s game to be "authentic baseball taken to arcade proportions."

I cannot help but feel like this is the wrong approach when making arcade-sports games, and a huge reason why none of today’s products seem to match the fun factor of the genre’s classics.

Of course, for titles adhering to the rules and regulations of strict league licenses, the over-the-top violence of classic games like EA’s Mutant League Football/Hockey are probably out of the realm of possibility. But even if licensed games cannot give us crazy violence, they could at least include other options that help distinguish modern "simulation" products from their "arcade" counterparts.

While arcade games do have a long history of distinguishing themselves with power-ups that give players turbo speed, super strength, etc., why is it that the power-up types in modern games never seem to go beyond those same boring physical attributes?

Surely there are sports developers out there today who have a little more imagination?

I ask because anyone who has played a game like Looney Tunes B-Ball can attest, the crazier the power-ups are, the more fun the game often becomes.

After all, who would not have fun playing a game where you can hit your opponent in the face with a cream pie, turn the ball into a ticking time bomb or a greased pig, strike a would-be dunker out of the air with a bolt of electricity and reduce him to a pile of ashes -- just to name a few of the awesome character-specific abilities in the game.

Developers should look to a game like Looney Tunes B-Ball as a great example of how imaginative power-ups can make an average game more than that. Because while Looney Tunes may not have a whole lot of personality to its core gameplay -- it is really just a simple NBA Jam clone -- the over-the-top special moves are a big reason why the game is worth playing over and over again.

Game Speed and Game Pacing

Part of what separates an arcade-sports game from a simulation game is the former's ability to provide a quick burst of competition without forcing its players to jump through hoops when all they really want to do is take the field and crack some skulls.

Back in the days of real arcades, sports games met those expectations by simply allowing players to drop in a quarter (or two), pick their team and then go out and play a game until the final whistle blew or the game asked for more money.

While a lot of the console games today do offer bare-bones "quick play" options, many of them still get bogged down with clunky menus, frequent replays, unnecessary post-play activities, too many penalties, giving players too much time to choose their play and so on. When these delays start to pile up, they really have the potential to drain all the fun out of the arcade experience.

One of the best things about classic arcade-sports games like Baseball Stars and Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB was the fact that you could get through an entire game in about 10-15 minutes or an entire World Series in an hour or two.

The pace of those games was fast because the movement from one pitch to the next was instantaneous. Replays and other post-play shenanigans were unheard of, and changing sides in between innings took little more than a single press of the "A" or "B" button.

These games represent everything arcade-sports games should be: a complete blitzkrieg of action, with no unnecessary timeouts on the field and no room to breathe in between plays or in between scores.

Content, Options and Customization

One of the flaws that hurt arcade-sports games during the "Midway-dominated" era in the mid-late 1990s was the complete lack of content compared to "traditional" console-sports games.

In Midway’s defense, a lot of companies’ arcade ports back then were suffering from the same lack of bonus content; nonetheless, those feature-bare games just could not compare to console classics like Baseball Stars (legendary create-a-player feature) or Ken Griffey Jr. Presents MLB (awesome replications of real stadiums and addictive home run derby mini-game).

But as arcades around the United States began to decline in the late-1990s and early-2000s, developers of arcade-sports games had to make their games exclusively for consoles. This is about the point when Midway and co. finally started adding extra content to their games in the form of created players, created teams, created plays, franchise modes, game sliders, etc.

Frankly, it is the addition of all that meaty content that was the key factor in creating the renaissance of arcade-sports games from roughly 2001-2005. For the first time since the NES/SNES/Genesis days, the arcade games finally had as much meat on their bones as the simulation alternatives.

For some reason, as developers made the recent transition to the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles, the degree of content and features in arcade-sports games regressed back to the bare state they were in during the N64/PSone years.

When developers were only a year or two into this new console cycle, the lack of features was somewhat understandable. However, now that we are knee-deep in the current-gen cycle; the excuse of "not enough time" is used up.

Just as illegitimate is the excuse that, since gameplay in an arcade-sports title is not "serious" to begin with, developers can get away with leaving their games completely bare in the features department.

I will use the recently released 3-on-3 NHL Arcade as an example of this issue. While the gameplay in 3-on-3 is fast, hard-hitting fun, the options included in the game are truly pathetic. The product feels so rushed and hacked together that not even something as simple as being able to save your controls/camera settings made it into the final code.

And to top it all off, the developers at EA Canada have the gall to flash this message in your face as you exit the game:

"EXPERIENCE NHL 09 FOR GREAT FEATURES LIKE DYNASTY MODE, BE A PRO, EASHL, AND MANY MORE!"

As if the developers are somehow deserving of a "free pass" for excluding those features just because they made an arcade-style game. To that, I think Lee Corso would say, "not so fast, my friend."

Gameplay Can Be Simple While Still Having Depth

Every sports developer wants their game to fall into the category of "easy to play, difficult to master." But how have developers actually achieved that balance throughout history?

Tecmo accomplished this goal in Tecmo Super Bowl by creating a rock-paper-scissors method of play-calling and whoever-mashes-the-button-harder-wins-the-battle tackling system.

Other developers, like the now-defunct Black Box, brought that same Rochambeau style to the 128-bit consoles when it built the gameplay for NHL Hitz and Sega Soccer Slam -- both of which create situations where X offensive move trumps Y defensive move but is beaten by Z defensive move.

Midway’s classic Blitz/Jam games require players to balance their finesse stick skills with strategic use of turbo and knowledge of how the game works.

And in the genre of baseball, there are way too many games to list that have found great success by using the simple mathematical formulas of angle of contact and pitch velocity to determine whether a batted ball ends up in the infield or in the stadium parking lot.

So why is it that today’s arcade-sports games seem to have gameplay that is either too complex to get casual players into the game or too simple to keep the hardcore crowd interested?

Part of the problem, it seems, is that today’s controllers just have too many functions for their own good. Whether it comes from an excess of buttons or from newfangled motion-controls, the temptation is always there for developers to cram as many functions in the controls as possible, or worse, dumb everything down to a single "idiot button" that tries (and fails) to govern all of the game’s actions.

What gamers need is something in between: a two- or three-button approach -- just like in the 8-bit and 16-bit days -- with enough flexibility built into the control scheme so each one of those buttons can have enough context sensitivity to control multiple actions.

In other words, developers should be putting the burden of controlling multiple actions on the game engine and its control scheme, not on the player.