A common topic on social media you may see is people discussing the best sports video games.
I of course do not see these posts because I’m not a loser nerd, so I only see DMs from supermodels and Drake and Tom Brady’s “close friends” stories when I’m on social media.
Okay, back to reality. I grew up enjoying video games and love sports games in particular, so I definitely fall into the demographic that sees these posts, as I’m sure many of the readers in the audience that would even read this article do as well. If that makes me a loser nerd (as some asshole blog author may have suggested a few sentences ago), then so be it.
These discussions often center around the best games of all time for their respective sports. Some common ones (among others within debates) are NFL 2K5 and NCAA 14 for football, NHL 14 for hockey, MVP Baseball 2005 for baseball, and NBA 2K11 for basketball. In addition to these, there are some popular arcade style games, including NFL Street, NHL Hitz, NBA Jam, MLB Slugfest, The Bigs (I really liked The Bigs 2), and of course, the Backyard Sports series (shoutout to my GOAT, Pablo Sanchez).
Today, I wanted to take the chance to talk about some of my favorites as a kid for each sport that don’t get as much attention now, but brought me hours of joy (the aforementioned supermodels had to be patient for my attention while I was on the game).
Read until the end for a funny (I can laugh about it now, at least) personal story about my dickhead little league coach that I just felt like telling, so I loosely tied it to a video game I’m talking about today.
Hockey
NHL Slapshot
I’ll preface that my console for my younger childhood, until about middle school when I got an Xbox 360 one Christmas, was the Wii. I love the Wii, and if you didn’t have one you might’ve missed the greatest hockey game ever made, with “The Great One” himself donning the cover. The game was pretty arcadey with massive hits and meteoric slapshots, but also played relatively like a simulation style game, which was a nice balance. There was also a gamemode called “Peewee to Pro” where you could play as a kid and make your way all the way to the NHL. I decided to play as Gretzky, and in my first season after being drafted by the Blackhawks, I think I scored a little over 200 goals in 40-60 games. I like to think that’s indicative of how I’d fare in the show.
The main draw, however, was the plastic and foam Wiimote-Nunchuck hockey stick. So sick. You could just stand in front of your TV actually winding up for some outlandish clap-bombs. I like to think that actually helped me as a real life hockey player. Invaluable practice, and I logged more hours than anyone. I might’ve even broke a sweat.
Basketball
NBA Playgrounds
I never owned this game, but my A2Z co-writer Aidan did. After school we’d head to his house and play videogames before heading off to our practices. Those games were Fortnite (obviously) and NBA Playgrounds, which we played on the Nintendo Switch. It honestly wasn’t anything crazy; it’s just an arcade style basketball kinda like NBA Jam. It was 2v2, it had cool abilities and ludicrous dunks. It’s just a good time. One cool thing it did was let you earn packs to collect player cards, and you could use those players to take on preset duos in tournament style challenges. The cool part about this is that you were almost forced into using legends that you don’t really think much about nowadays.
Aidan and I would run duos. I think we had Shaq’s card at one point, which was sweet. One of the teams I remember using was David “The Admiral” Robinson, and Danny “FROM DEEP” Ainge. That Danny Ainge nickname probably won’t make sense to you, but Aidan will enjoy that when he sees it.
Football
Backbreaker
I played this both on mobile and on Xbox, and the experience was pretty much the same. The idea behind this game was simple. You start at one end zone, juke, spin, truck, and hurdle would-be tacklers, and avoid going out of bounds or into restricted areas on your way to a touchdown within a set amount of time. It’s really easy to score, but the point is to rack up as many points as possible by running through point zones, getting combo multipliers by evading defenders, and showboating from 30 yards out in a way that would probably get you an unsportsmanlike conduct flag that would get you tarred and feathered instead of 15 yards. There was a reverse game mode called “Vengeance” or something like that where you play as the tackler, but the concept is the same. Not much else to say here.
The mechanics and gameplay were impressively smooth and it felt pretty realistic movement-wise. It was a great way to kill time and see how thoroughly I could shit on the defense to rack up absurd levels of points.
Madden Mobile 15 & 16
These games weren’t really under the radar; they were really wildly popular and swept the nation. However, I think they deserve a place in the pantheon of greatest football games of all time. You had to be there. All the boys crushing challenges and making sure to stay active so they could quickly build a stacked team that could compete in league tournaments against other leagues was unreal. It became an actual activity. My friends (including Aidan) were all in a (crassly named, as one might expect from a 14 or 15 year old) league and would get super hyped and competitive trying to take down other leagues and have the sickest team at school (not to brag but my overall was over 99 in 16. No, I did not have a girlfriend at the time, why do you ask?). As a free mobile game, it was extremely accessible, so pretty much every dude at school was on board. It was insane.
The game also, unbeknownst to another friend, gave you a badge that everyone else could see if you dropped money on the game. He desperately wanted a better team, so he tried to surreptitiously spend some money to get a leg up. Of course, we all saw the badge and clowned him brutally for it. I miss those days sometimes… Oh to be young again.
Baseball
Little League World Series Baseball 2008
Out of all of the games on this list, I might’ve had the most fun playing this one.
I was reminded of this game this week while watching the actual Little League World Series going on right now. I got a wave of nostalgia from it, as it was probably one of my first video games (along with Madden 09, NHL 2K9, Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga, Lego Indiana Jones, and Wii Sports of course).
Fuck man, now I’m a little sad. I wish I could go back and be an 8 year old again playing on my Wii for a bit.
Anyway, the show goes on. This hard-hitting journalism won’t write itself.
The game was cool because I was in Little League at the time myself and was looking forward to playing on Williamsport (little league all-stars competing to make the LLWS in the summer) teams, so I could really get into playing the game because it felt like it could be me. Because of this, I literally only ever played as team New England.
Beyond the relatability, the game was really cool. There were fun minigames, including a hitting game with balloons if I remember correctly and a carnival style pitching booth. The whole game was a bit anime-themed, and if you loaded up enough on a skill bar, you could basically do a flip and start glowing with a blue flame, and be nearly guaranteed a strikeout with 100 mph heaters if you were on the mound or a 400-foot bomb if you were at the plate. The game is one of my favorites and it’s criminally underrated in the baseball video game discussions.
Semi-related storytime to finish this one out
Sidenote on my Williamsport teams, speaking of the LLWS. My asshole coach in our elimination game decided to pull some wild managerial decision and bench me for the entire game (in favor of his son, who actually ended up being a very good player when we were older, and his buddies, I think) which made no sense to me because I was pretty good in Little League (not to toot my own horn). My main position was catcher, but we had a bigger catcher (huge factor) so that kid got to play, which would have been fine if my coach had realized I could play other positions too.
This was my last year of Little League, I think, and I’d just come off a championship in which I cocked two dingers and we won. My coach inexplicably gave me the minimum required amount of playing time in that last game: One pinch hit appearance. He gave me the bunt signal. I, obviously, ignored this and hit a single. We were down by maybe 15 runs at that point and I didn’t feel that moving the runner over was going to make any difference, so I made sure to at least get a hack in.
To this day, I’m pissed about it. I get that he probably was just doing what he felt was best to win and didn’t want to give up his strategy even when we got our doors blown off, but come on. I was 12 years old; I was just a little kid. Let me have fun playing baseball. I was furious and on the verge of tears leaving the game. Even my dad was pretty pissed, which wasn’t like him. Probably the worst coaching decision ever in sports by that guy. What a dick.
All that time on the bench at least allowed me to drink the most Gatorade on the team that day, though, so there’s your silver lining.
I hope you all enjoyed this trip down memory lane, both through my little league woes and some of my favorite games growing up. If you ever have the chance to play any of these games, I’d highly recommend them. If you have played them, or have any other games you want to mention feel free to leave a comment or tweet at us @A2ZSportsTakes. Until next time.