Harlem Globetrotters: World Tour

The Harlem Globetrotters are world famous for their hardcourt exhibitions—gymnastic spectacles and capering antics that are so carnivalesque and "worked" that they are to professional basketball what professional wrestling is to amateur Greco-Roman grappling. For over a century, the Globetrotters have barnstormed mid-sized towns (mostly mid-western) to promulgate their hardwood hijinks, beating up on enhancement talent teams ("jobbers" in pro wrestling lingo) like the New Jersey Reds, the New York Nationals, and the infamous Washington Generals.

Inevitably, an institution so enduring would receive its own video game, and the Globetrotters have been around long enough to have attained that milestone twice over. The first virtual foray into sports-entertainment basketball was a five-on-five affair for the NES, released in 1990. While solid enough graphically, the game was fairly light on theatrics and heavy on the hardnosed simulation elements. In fact, it was so hard, it was not uncommon to lose by 50 points to the CPU—and that was when playing as the Globetrotters against the Generals on the easiest difficulty. 

Thankfully, the Globetrotters got the game they deserved 16 years later. This was Harlem Globetrotters World Tour for the Gameboy Advance. The game features a two-on-two, arcadey format very much inspired by the NBA Jam and NBA Hangtime style. This feels truer to the Globetrotters' unique sports-entertainment experience. And, also in fidelity with the Globetrotter's MO, when using the titular titans in World Tour mode or exhibition, the human player can absolutely destroy computer opponents like the LA Lashers, London Lords, and Shanghai Spirits (the Generals are, sadly, absent from this game). A one-sided game is fun at first, but by the fourth quarter it starts to feel a bit sadistic. Elsewhere on this blog, your correspondent has often championed the overly easy game, given that such offerings alienate no one; that said, with World Tour, things are a little too simple. If you're looking for real challenge, try challenging the Globetrotters with one of the jobber teams. With some divine intervention, you might do what hasn't been done since January 5, 1971—that fateful night in Martin, Tennessee when the Generals beat the Globetrotters.

If there is to be a third Globetrotters' game, the developers might not necessarily have to make the competition fiercer. Rather, they might focus on the Globetrotters' wrestling-esque approach and take a page from squared-circle simulations. The best of all wrestling games, Fire Pro Wrestling World, does not measure a player's success in wins and losses, which are somewhat immaterial in the world of wrestling. Rather, Fire Pro judges matches based on their quality—that is, the story they tell, and the high spots they hit—all of it digested in a "match rating" awarded at the end of a match. Perhaps a future Globetrotters game could leave victory for the Harlem side as a foregone conclusion, as it most always is, and focus instead on ability to pull off a sufficient numbers of behind-the-back shots, hot-dog dunks, and ladder-aided layups. That would better encapsulate the timeless Globetrotter experience.

Pro Race Driver

Pro Race Driver is the best racing video game ever made for any system, bar none. Forget Gran Turismo, Forza, NASCAR Thunder, or Flag to Flag. Forget F-Zero. And for god’s sake, forget Mario Kart.

Released in 2002 for Xbox and PlayStation 2, Pro Race Driver was the newest iteration in Codemasters' consistently stellar TOCA touring car game series. While maintaining the precision control and realism of previous TOCA iterations, Pro Race Driver adds a revolutionary story-line element. You control the principal character, steering him through increasingly prestigious auto-racing series, all the while building his driving competencies. You'll go from slumming it in NASCAR-esque stock cars to styling and profiling in esteemed car types like unto F1. On account of this RPG-styled progression, Pro Race Driver has sometimes been referred to as a "Car-PG."

You learn to love your main character. He's not just a faceless driver. His name is Ryan "Octane" McKane, and you are given the opportunity to make him all your own by editing his nickname before embarking on a campaign. The immediate temptation is to go perverse while keeping the rhyme scheme: your correspondent went with "Shit Stain"; your correspondent’s associate decided upon "Come Stain." Either way, the matter of how Mr. McKane earned a nickname so evocative makes for intriguing ludo-narrative possibilities.

These cosmetic considerations aside, the appeal of Pro Race Driver is that you are directing a real man with flaws and vulnerabilities that you encounter over the course of the many raceways. Yes, Ryan McKane can be shrill at times, but he's also persistent and exacting. You see this in the car and on the infield, and you also see this in his dating life. Indeed, one of the subplots has you courting racing groupies (is the term "race rats"?). As you learn more and more about Shit Stain McKane, the man, over the course of various races and relationships, you start to wipe away the flaws and polish up the propensities.

Also worth noting: the graphics are photo-realistic

Each championship series consist of around six races, approximately seven laps each. This is just the right length, not too long or too short. The controls are velvety and user-friendly, and the competition ultra-forgiving, so you'll move through the game breezily. Less time redoing all the racing leaves more time for relating with the ladies (at least in-game).

Given its variety of car-types, its innovative RPG-styled story mode, its realism, and its accessibility, Pro Race Driver is a must-own of the highest order. Beyond all this, it possesses a personality—an unvarnished humanity—that all other racing games lack. This gritty verisimilitude sets Pro Race Driver apart as the greatest of all time. Pro Race Driver outpaces present-day racing games and, best of all, few game sellers realize this—as such, it's easy to find for cheap.

Tecmo Super Bowl

In the January 1997 issue of GamePro, Tecmo ran an ad for the PS1 adaptation of Tecmo Super Bowl, the sequel to the company's most famous sports game. The ad spans two pages, the left presenting a drawing of an Oakland Raiders' ball-carrier emerging from the Tecmo Super Bowl jewel case, the right bearing the phrase "It's UN-BOWL-IEVABLE" atop four columns of text in 10-point font. The text is arranged under nine sub-headings. The ad is text-heavy, to put it plainly, and it reads like it was written by someone's CEO dad, who figured that explaining the appeals of the game very rationally, lucidly, sensibly, and at times laconically, all in a tone that is one part inter-office memo, one part life-lesson, would be the best way to sell Tecmo Super Bowl. The content of this advertorial-styled text is what will concern us here, as the game essentially reviews itself therein.

The text starts by promising that "Tecmo Super Bowl allows the user to trade any player, to any team, at any time. With this feature you have the ability to create your own Super Team. Just be careful when you're playing a friend. You had better make sure he [sic] didn't set you up. The only advice we can give is check your opponent's roster." The author(s) then goes on to the audio: "Tecmo Super Bowl's announcer gives true Play by Play [emphasis in original], not just an occasional phrase or two. If perhaps you think he's an idiot, you always have the option of turning him off." Then there is tournament mode, to which the author adds a dash of laconic levity: "Over the years Tecmo Super Bowl players have let us [the developers, presumably] know about the friendly competitions which sometimes take place. This version has a built in tournament mode for a total of 8 players playing one on one till one of the players wins the tournament. Chips and drinks are sadly not included." There are then four full sentences dedicated to the difficulty levels: "Knowing that some people haven't been playing Tecmo Super Bowl for years we've included 3 difficulty settings. Easy, Normal and Hard. Our football game gives you the ability to grow with the game. Internally we call this a screen save 'cause you don't have to throw a rock through the TV screen when you get frustrated with the game." Again, the writer—his or her hand presumably guided by someone in senior management who did not play video games, nor set foot in middle-class households—scrabbles to get the tone right, as is evident from the apostrophic shortening of "because." The wry wit returns for the description of instant replay: "If you want to analyze the last several seconds of play, simply pause the game and start the instant replay. In addition you can go frame by frame to fully analyze all of the action. Then again, you may not want to see the interception again, and again, and again, and again." By this point, having detailed the rather rudimentary feature of instant replay, which had been in football video games for approximately five years by this point, the advertorial seems just a bit condescending. The ad moves on to the game's statistical capabilities: "Tecmo's stats engine has always been unsurpassed. This year we've added the ability to keep the stats from any player in any position even if it's only for 1 play during the entire season. Here's your one and only chance to re-write the record book." Okay. And as for the play-calling capabilities: "From the game play menu, you now have access to the entire playbook for the immediate play. ...for [sic] more plays than you can possibly want, use, call, send-in, modify, change, and/or run as the case may be."

To this point, none of these features seem particularly revolutionary. Only when it comes to weather does the advertisement (if not the game itself) speak to something original: "Ordinary football games sometimes have weather conditions. So far as we know, Tecmo Super Bowl is the only game to actually change the weather during the game. So one minute it could be raining, and then it could start snowing, or then again stop or actually it's too variable to give you all the possible scenarios." From here the advertorial-cum-term paper moves into its conclusion, under the heading "MORE, MORE AND MORE": "We've tried to highlight some of the most important new features of Tecmo Super Bowl for the Sony PlayStation. Obviously, there are more features than we can possibly list. Tecmo Super Bowl is one of the most realistic and sophisticated football simulators ever created. Aside from all the technical improvements, think about the following: [...]." It is at this point that the advertorial switches its mode of persuasion from rhetorical to mathematical, providing this formula: "1 TECMO SUPER BOWL/1 SONY PLAYSTATION/1 Television + 2 OR MORE PLAYERS = GREAT FOOTBALL FUN."

For those rationalists among the gaming crew, this straightforward, detailed explanation might have us wetting our lips. But rationalism died out in advertising in the 1920s. Even if your game (or any product, really), lives up to the arguments and overall thesis you put forward in the advertisement, it will do little to sway a consumer. Since Edward Bernays introduced psychoanalytic principles to public relations and advertising, desire has been all the rage in selling products. In that sense, Tecmo's ad-staff and CEO were about seven decades behind the curve. They fare better when it comes to football video games, as they’re only a several years behind. Tecmo Super Bowl does not even live up to its description. Graphically, it’s a pixelated nightmare, even compared to contemporaneous offerings of Madden and Gameday. Moreover, the announcer is minimalistic. The only redeeming feature is the ability to trade any player to any team. Regardless, Tecmo Bowl for NES this is not, and reading the above description, you almost feel as if you don't have to play the game to know that. Rereading the ad in the context of Tecmo Super Bowl’s failings, it comes off more like an argument justifying the game’s existence, rather than attesting to any merit it might actually have. It is, in sum, not "GREAT FOOTBALL FUN", but more like MODERATE FOOTBALL FUN, at best. Tecmo Super Bowl, then, is one game that reads a lot better than it plays.

Team USA Basketball

The story of the Dream Team begins not in 1992 but in 1988. That year, at the Olympic Games in Seoul, South Korea, the United States men's basketball team suffered a disheartening defeat to the Soviet Union in the semi-finals and went on to settle for a bronze medal. It seemed unfair. Players from communist countries like the USSR were grizzled vets who had balled as teammates for years, yet maintained their amateur status due to dubious day-jobs they’d been assigned by their governments. For all intents and purposes, they were de facto professional basketball players. The USA squads, meanwhile, consisted of college players, legitimate amateurs who were thrown together every four years with very little opportunity to gel as a team. Even with that being the case, USA teams had only lost 2 games in all the years since basketball was incepted as an Olympic event in 1936 (the 1972 final marking their other defeat), but that wasn’t good enough for America, which of course demands total domination. Eventually, the FIBA, the basketball equivalent of soccer’s FIFA, came to see how unfair America was being treated, and permitted the United States to field a team of professionals for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.

This wasn't exactly fair, either. What resulted from this allowance was the Dream Team, a collection of eleven of the greatest basketball players of all-time...and Christian Laettner. The team featured Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, David Robinson, Larry Bird, Karl Malone, Clyde Drexler, Charles Barkley, and Magic Johnson, among others. To say they dominated would be both an understatement and redundant. They won all their games at the 1992 Olympics by blowouts, the closest decision coming in the gold medal final, in which they squeaked past Croatia by 32 points. It would also be a redundant understatement to say that so mighty an ensemble of luminaries was a marketing force of unlimited potential. To be sure, a worldwide tide of Dream Team tie-ins washed over the consuming classes in the summer of 1992.

Laettner, relegated to the back row (and frowning)

One of these tie-ins was Team USA Basketball for the Sega Genesis. Published by Electronic Arts, the game was patterned after EA's NBA Playoffs series, and is nearly identical to the earlier release Bulls vs Lakers and the NBA Playoffs save for changes vis-à-vis timekeeping and court dimensions to accord with international basketball rules. And though the USA basketball team of 1992 was undoubtedly the best ever, the same cannot be said for its eponymous game. Team USA Basketball is, on the whole, more like Christian Laettner, the Duke Blue Devils' mercurial standout who found his way onto the Dream Team as the singular college player. Laettner, like early EA basketball games, seemed promising at the time, but would age terribly and be largely forgotten. Plugging in Team USA Basketball for present-day play, one embarks upon an extremely slow-paced rendering of international hoops. Team USA Basketball can be called immersive insofar as it is like being immersed in molasses. Nor is it easy to pick up and play. Having selected the Dream Team and proceeding on medium difficulty, your correspondent lost convincingly to Team Canada, which shot 95% from the floor. Keep in mind, this was Canada pre-Steve Nash. When you shell out cash for the Dream Team, you expect total American dominance, or at least some blissful sliver of it. Even the most casual gamer should be able to win by ten or more when playing as the Dream Team, especially against Canada pre-Nash. That’s what the Dream Team was (and what America is) all about—casual domination—and Team USA Basketball fails to deliver it.

As awe-inspiring as the Dream Team may have been, it didn't make for a good on-court product, and neither does its tie-in video game. If you want to play as the Dream Team in style, check out NBA 2K13—it's got the 1992 and 2012 USA Olympic basketball teams, and the former has all the speed, ease, and domination you'd expect of Jordan, Pippen, and Robinson (if not Laettner). 

Blast Lacrosse

In 2001, lacrosse was at its absolute pinnacle—that is to say, it had reached the outer periphery of the mainstream sports world. The National Lacrosse League (NLL) was flourishing, going nine teams strong in major markets like Philadelphia, New York and Toronto, with no fewer than four more expansion teams slated for the 2002 season. The season was also expanded from 12 to 14 games. There was none bigger, though, than the 2001 NLL championship game, which drew the largest crowd in league history, with nearly 20,000 packing into Toronto's Air Canada Centre to see the hometown Rock lose to the Philadelphia Wings. Everything was clear sailing for the NLL in the spring of 2001, and, as is often the case when even the most tenuous commercial potential presents itself to the American marketplace, a video game was in order.

What God sees when He/She watches lacrosse.

This game was the NLL licensed Blast Lacrosse published by Acclaim Sports in 2001, which is actually something of a treasure. Gameplay proceeds from a top-down perspective, sort of like NHL 94, but on a green surface with players running instead of skating. In fact, as per NHL 94, Blast Lacrosse even has its own version of "The Move"—that is, being able to score consistently by proceeding out from the corner parallel to the goal-line and then depositing the pill into the cage. For a sports game, comparisons to NHL 94 usually bode well, and this proves to be the case for Blast Lacrosse. The game is for the most part fun, which is aided by the intractably arcadey approach. Big hits, for instance, send players flying up in the air and often leave them writhing on the floor, even after play has stopped and the rest of their team is lining up for the ensuing faceoff. There are no penalties, and, as per arcade sports fare like NBA Jam or NFL Blitz, consecutive scoring plays cause players to "heat up" and then go "on fire". All told, Blast Lacrosse doesn't take itself too seriously, which is perhaps most obvious when you hear the play-by-play announcer crooning "Goodnight Irene" multiple times in course of the same contest. The voice-work is provided by Scott Ferrall, who, with his croupy, half-wit quipping sounds sort of like he's semi-feral. It's worth repeating that he’s repetitive. Regardless, sound is hardly a problem compared to the graphics. The Blast Lacrosse character models are awful, pixel-faced triangles with lacrosse sticks.

The issues of presentation do not take away, however, from Blast Lacrosse, which, on the whole nicely commemorates the three or four months in 2001 when the NLL was reaching previously uncharted heights of popularity on after-hours ESPN 8. Now the NLL has sunk considerably in profile, if it ever had a profile, and has even resorted to putting teams in exotic locales like Saskatchewan, which your correspondent thinks is located somewhere in Jamaica. Regardless, Blast Lacrosse reminds us of a time when professional “Lax” (as the initiated call it) flirted with relevance. The game might just be the most exciting lacrosse experience available, more memorable than much of what takes place in NLL arenas past and present.

NHL Stanley Cup

If you'll indulge him, your correspondent will begin this review with an autobiographical sketch. The year was 1993. Your late-adolescent correspondent was in Wal-Mart (perhaps it was Wool-co at that point), and in the aisle leading to the electronics section, a promotional booth had been set up. The booth had a large TV screen and a Super Nintendo under the giant cardboard logo with the blown-up title and box-art of a game: NHL Stanley Cup. The store employee running the display booth called me over and suggested I take a turn what she described as the "best hockey video game," or something to that effect.

"But I already have NHL 94," your correspondent remarked, not as a crack-back but rather in that innocent, matter-of-fact way that incorrigibly earnest children have.

"Oh no," said the store-appointed spokes-lady. "NHL Stanley Cup is much better."

Your correspondent was unconvinced but not un-intrigued. The demo clips from NHL Stanley Cup that played on the giant screen drew the eye. The sprites were big, and, more jarringly, the game was played at ice-level in what appeared to be 3D. This was completely unlike NHL 94. But could it possibly be better?

In hopes of answering this question, your correspondent waited by the booth as the god-bless-her-she's-trying spokes-lady attempted to flag down another customer. Eventually, she commandeered an older boy—a taller boy—who was red-faced and trim, who looked like he might even play some hockey himself. Smilingly, he picked up the controller, and we started into a game.

Your correspondent and the older boy played through one period of arduous lumbering and puck-chasing. They each had a few good scoring chances in front of the net, but neither could put the puck home. The goalies were too good. The period ended scoreless.

The spokes-lady took the liberty of declaring the older boy the winner. She based this on the fact that he had had more shots on goal. Your correspondent drifted away the loser, but not exactly feeling like he had lost. He only felt like he wanted to play NHL 94.

In retrospect, your correspondent is not convinced that that compulsion to play NHL 94 was the sour grapes of a child who had been "defeated." It was more likely the nascent discrimination of a discerning gamer in the making. That said, one does not have to be particularly discerning to realize that NHL Stanley Cup is inferior to NHL 94. In retrospect, your correspondent feels a measure of pity for that Wal-Mart (or Wool-co) spokes-lady. She'd been saddled with the ultimate tough sell: pitting the mediocre NHL Stanley Cup against NHL 94, widely agreed to be the greatest sports game of ever released.

If judged by the cover, which formed the backdrop of the display booth in that aisle, NHL Stanley Cup promises exhilaration. In a scene that could have been taken from the 1993 Stanley Cup Finals, the cover drawing depicts a generic blond member of the Los Angeles Kings skating in on the Montreal Canadiens’ goalie. The subtext is that the latter is Patrick Roy, though it's not really Patrick Roy because NHL Stanley Cup did not have an NHLPA license. Sweat is beading on the brow of the Kings' attacker (too blond and handsome to be Gretzky) as he follows through with a snap-shot, which has already been kicked away by the twine-minder.

Unfortunately, this cover drawing is more exciting than anything that ever happens in NHL Stanley Cup itself. The game is based entirely around dump-and-chase, the boring style of hockey that became more commonplace in the NHL post-1993. In that sense, NHL Stanley Cup was ahead of its time, but not in a positive way. Indeed, it's full of the boring 1-0 and 2-1 games that defined pro hockey for the next decade. And as per that scoreless period played between your correspondent and the older, taller, red-faced boy, the game is irredeemably boring. The Mode 7, pseudo-3D graphics catch the eye at first, but they quickly grow tiresome and bewildering. 3D scaling may have worked for NCAA Final Four, on the grounds that changes of possession in basketball are generally tied to scoring plays, but it renders the game of hockey, where possession-changes are fluid and constant, almost unplayable. As such, the camera is constantly flipping around. NHL '94's top-down style is far superior in this regard; indeed, even with all the camera angles available on present-day systems, the rooftop view is simply how video game hockey has to be played.

But NHL Stanley Cup is not entirely forgettable. It bears repeating that the goalies are just too good, both defensively and on offense. Indeed, it is distressingly easy to score a goal as the goalie, and not just with the other team's net empty (as per the real-life Ron Hextall, the goalie who scored two empty-net goals). Rather, when your goalie has the puck, you can skate him out of the crease for an inordinate amount of time and space before drawing a whistle. If you get to the red line and then dump the puck, you can score on the other team with some consistency. It's easier, then, to score as the goalie than with the average attacker. If only your correspondent had known about the goalies’ scoring touch while he was playing against the older boy. Perhaps this is the real thesis of NHL Stanley Cup—that one day the goalies will rise and come unshackled from their creases, taking back the ice from their free-skating oppressors. Perhaps this is the reason why the pseudo-Patrick Roy on the cover of NHL Stanley Cup is making the save rather than giving up the goal. Its status as a radical, pro-goalie manifesto, then, is the one reason (and one reason only) NHL Stanley Cup remains noteworthy.

Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

In 1992, Nintendo revolutionized a game. This did not happen with respect with video games, but rather involved a move in the sports world: namely, Nintendo's purchase of the Seattle Mariners. With this purchase, the Mariners became the first Major League Baseball team owned by foreign investors. Now the game that purported to be as American as apple-pie and gun violence had Japanese ownership woven into its fabric. So revolutionary was the move that not all major league owners were on board with it. In fact, the final vote among the owners to approve the sale went 25-1, with the Cleveland Indians ownership backing out. Should we surprised, though, that a team named after and marketed around a racial caricature would be xenophobic with respect to welcoming East Asian proprietors into America's pastime?

One person who was definitely not unenthused with the move was Hiroshi Yamauchi, the venerable then-president of Nintendo. In fact, the usually inscrutable Yamauchi was over the moon at the idea of being part-owner of an MLB team. So excited was he at the Makuharu Messe convention in Tokyo in 1992 that, during his keynote address in which he detailed future prospects for the Super NES, he spontaneously announced that he had not only bought the Mariners, but that Nintendo was in the process of making the greatest baseball video game ever made. This was news to the various development ingénues in attendance, including none other than Shigeru Miyamoto. The announcement also confused Tony Harman, Nintendo's director of development and acquisitions, a former college soccer star who had parlayed a baccalaureate of engineering and a master's degree in business into a job as game reviewer for Nintendo Power. Not the least of his difficulties was the fact he didn't speak Japanese. Sitting in the presence of Nintendo's virtuosos, Harman turned to Miyamoto and asked him to dispel some of his confusion by translating. With his limited English, Miyamoto explained that the baseball game Mr. Yamauchi had reference was not only not in development, but that none of the old masters, including Miyamoto himself, had even heard of the game. Over and above that, none of the development doyennes wanted to tell Yamauchi that there was no such game in development, as they would likely be the ones entrusted with rushing the game into production. Harman asked who would be overseeing this game. And then, if the account in Blake J. Harris's Console Wars is to be believed, Miyamoto turned to Harman and said, altogether jokingly, "you." This occasioned laughter from Nintendo’s mavens, but it spurred Harman into action. Harman was going to design the greatest baseball game ever made.

That quest led to the development of Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball, released for the SNES in 1994. The reins were taken up by Software Creations, a developer based in Manchester, England, a curious choice given that baseball is a cultural non-entity in Britain. The baseball game that resulted unmistakably shows its British—or at least non-American—influences. America's pastime as depicted in this game looks and plays like a funhouse simulacra of itself. Many a hitter has a massive upper-torso, all bicep and chest, with a bony lower half, making for an excessively cartoonish look that may have been an attempt to satire steroid fueled baseball of the 1990s (and beyond). More egregiously, pitches can be controlled after they are thrown, making pitching an excursion into magical realism. The pitcher-batter encounter, then, is essentially reduced to a showdown between a muscle-bound monstrosity of human growth hormone and a horsehide-hucking wizard. In this version of baseball, everything is turned up to eleven. Gum-chewing batters blow bubbles insouciantly. Strike out victims break bats over their knees, shouting churlish complaints to the umpire. Every fly-ball springs off the bat, soaring high over the vast green tundra of the outfield, from which every single throw returns to the infield without a bounce. Given its international origins, the game must inevitably be read as a commentary on America. Through the combined efforts of the Japanese inceptors and British developers, what has resulted is a counter-Orientalist—or better yet intra-Occidentalist—parody of baseball. It is definitely a vision of baseball inflected with Anglo-European sensibilities of the absurd. As a result, it makes baseball look absurd. Apparently, for Nintendo's Japanese development brass, the laughs just wouldn't stop.

Bizarre aesthetics aside, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball is simple enough to pick up and play, and even the baseball neophyte—your average Britisher, perhaps—will be jacking warning-track blasts right from the very outset. The game is not, however, easy, and the computer is a more than formidable opponent who can readily put a crooked number on the scoreboard if your pitches are imprecisely maneuvered after they’ve left your hurler's hand. Be prepared: you will more than occasionally lose by double digits.

Nonetheless, there are ways in which Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball grows on you. All the MLB teams and logs are here, but the players are fictional, as the game does not have an MLBPA license. This is not entirely to the game's discredit, however, as the developers did not go with the usual generic renaming scheme as per other unlicensed sports titles. Rather, the developers provided each team with themed player names. Some of these are baseball related, as is the case for the New York Yankees, who have the sobriquets of famed Bronx Bombers, such as W. (Whitey ) Ford and T. (The) Bambino, as well as names of New York boroughs such as S. (Staten) Island. Other teams have names drawn from the world beyond baseball. The Colorado Rockies are all horror movie mainstays, including G. Romero, B. Lugosi and B. Karloff. Tom Savini takes the place of pitcher Bruce Ruffin; personally, your correspondent prefers a baseball game where practical effects genius Savini is pitching instead

Lux Interior trades his high heels for cleats

of Ruffin. Wouldn't that make for a more interesting major league? At least two teams are filled with the names of punk and rockabilly impresarios, including the Los Angeles Dodgers, which features members of The Dead Kennedys and The Cramps, among others. With the inclusion of an edit mode, the game allows the player to change these names, but why would you? Imagine the thrill of scratching out a hit with Cramps frontman Lux Interior, the man who, with jaw unhinged, performed the most profoundly surreal cover of the already psychotic Hasil Adkins classic "She Said." What other baseball game allows you to do that?

There is one player whose name cannot be changed, and that is, of course, cover-boy Ken Griffey Jr. of the Mariners, the only real baseball player in the game. Curiously enough, Griffey was not a lock to appear in the game, even after Nintendo had purchased the Mariners. Griffey was, in fact, in talks with Sega about appearing in a prospective baseball game for the Genesis right up until the verge of Nintendo's 1994 SNES release. We can only speculate as to what the effects would have been on the ongoing console wars had Griffey signed with Sega. Indeed, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball would go on to sell well for the SNES, and the family-friendly, child-like "Junior" surely had much to do with that. A middling, cartoonish game of baseball by any other name would probably not have fared so well.

What resulted from Tony Harman's toil was certainly not the greatest baseball game ever made. Nintendo may have revolutionized baseball ownership, but Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball did not do the same for video game depictions of baseball. Nonetheless, the game is worth playing to experience a parallel universe ruled by comic-book physics and baseball players who are HGH-infused avatars of truly cool people: punk rockers, horror heroes and American presidents (see the Kansas City Royals). Now that is what revolutionary truly looks like.

NCAA Football 2000

In the seventh chapter of his 2017 book ­­Bit by Bit, novelist Andrew Ervin sketches a compelling analogy between the history of video games and that of visual art. He parallels innovations made by Renaissance painters like da Vinci and Michelangelo with advancements made in video game development in the 32-bit era. While visual culture in the Middle Ages was characterized by a flatness of perspective and lack of dimensionality, Renaissance painters introduced depth of field, creating the impression of three dimensions on the canvass. Ervin submits that "one could say that Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64, successors to the SNES, accomplished something similar" (104). The PS1 and N64, then, in adding 3-dimensionality to video-gaming through the rotation of thousands of polygons per second, moved video games away from the flat, two dimensional imaginaries of the 8- and 16-bit eras and, in effect, ushered in something of a “renaissance” in their own right. Superficially, this comparison has a sort of intuitive momentum on account of the direct correspondence upon which it is founded: just like the Renaissance, game-designers of the 32/64-bit era added dimension to the visual representations they were creating. Adding dimension, however, does not a Renaissance make; truth be told, the 32- and 64-bit era was hardly a golden age for video games.

A fitting case in point is NCAA Football 2000. Among the most prominent selling points of the fin-du-millénaire edition of EA's popular college football franchise were its graphics. While its precursor NCAA 99 was the first in the series to feature three-dimensional polygonal graphics, NCAA 2000 updated the player models such that they came in varying sizes, and could be fully displayed in an array of camera angles during gameplay. Accordingly, wide receivers are lean and wiry, while linemen are Bunyanesque hosses. To the sports gamer of 1999, the year in which NCAA 2000 was released, this would have looked quite alluring. To the contemporary eye, however, NCAA 2000's graphics are abominable. Even when assuming the forgiving attitude the old-school gamer typically affords graphics from previous eras, NCAA 2000 is still an eye-sore. Especially problematic are those full-figured linemen, all of whom look like bloated quadrangular blobs. Of course, after the snap, it is nigh impossible to distinguish the bigger blobs from the littler ones, and play proceeds mostly in pixelated clumps. Animations, when discernible, are rigid and attenuated, and the gameplay is much the same, suffering from a damning combination of floaty movement and yet stiff articulation of actions. The game’s motion-captured sequences look passable in screen shots, but in-game they imbue the players with a jittery, cretinous manner of ambulation, a somewhat jarring break from their otherwise wooden movement patterns. In short, NCAA 2000 might have been better appreciated as a painting...in the Middle Ages. At present, NCAA looks and plays no more pleasingly than those vibrating motorized electric football games that were in currency (I hesitate to say "popular") in the 1960s and 70s.

Playing NCAA 2000, then, is to hearken back even further than the end of the 90s, to a time before video games, and potentially even a time before electricity. Seeing the abstract, undifferentiated masses wrought by these developers eager to make forays into polygonal graphics, one has scant convincing evidence for characterizing the PS1/N64 epoch as a "renaissance" of video gaming. Playing NCAA Football 2000, one wonders if the 32- and 64-bit era isn't more accurately described as a Dark Age.

NCAA Football 2000 is not without its bright spots, however, especially when it comes to bells and whistles. The game includes, for instance, a "Create-a-School" mode, which delivers as advertised, allowing you to pick the logo, stadium and even enrollment numbers for a cow college-cum-contender. Also, NCAA 2000 features a thoughtful "Great Games" mode in which the player can jump straight into bowl games of bygone eras, among other classics, such as the 1946 "Game of the Century" between Notre Dame and Army, which ended in a thrilling 0-0 tie.

As bowl season swings around, one might see NCAA 2000 among the cheap PS1 refuse in their local game store and get tempted to purchase it, revisiting the game as they would revisit classic bowl games of the past. Isn't there, after all, an ineffable appeal in a dizzying plurality of over-hyped perfunctory one-off playoff games for arbitrary championships named for foodstuffs and B-grade corporate entities? For even the most acute sufferer of bowl mania, however, NCAA 2000 is not the prescription. Although NCAA 2000 may have serviced a yearning among contemporaneous college-football fans, it is anything but timeless. Quite unlike a good piece of art, NCAA 2000 does not stand the test of time, not only against present-day college football fare, but even compared to college football games released a couple years later (such as NCAA 2002 for PS2). Its concomitant competitor on PS1, NCAA Gamebreaker 2000 by 989 Sports, though not a great game in itself, has actually aged better, largely on account of the fact that the developers weren't so overambitious with their player models. So while NCAA Football 2000's developers and many, many others in the 32-/64-bit era attempted a dimensional innovation not unlike that of Renaissance painters, the comparison falters when we consider outcomes. Da Vinci and other Renaissance artists did the additional dimension well. It wouldn’t be until the PS2/X-Box/GameCube era that three dimensions worked with consistent efficacy in video games. Like so many other games released for PS1 and N64, NCAA 2000 attempts to expand dimensionality, but it does so at the expense of coherence.

Olympic Hockey Nagano 98

Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 for the N64 embodies unrepentant exploitation of the highest order, though with that being said, it is not particularly good exploitation. Publisher Midway took the middling N64 puck proffering Wayne Gretzky's 3D Hockey, re-skinned the teams with international vestments, but didn't bother to make any improvements to the game in the process, all in hopes of getting it out in time for the Nagano Olympics.

As such, the flaws of Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 are largely those of Gretzky's 3D. Most egregiously, the game defaults to manual player switching—that is to say, without turning this off, you're stuck with the player you choose at the start of the period, which makes passing or even following the puck-carrier up ice far more difficult than it should be. Hockey video games should always allow you to control the puck carrier; this is not a point of debate. As such, expect a lot of off-sides and icings until you finally toggle player switching to “on”. On the sonic side, Olympic Hockey also features the usual Midway announcer, a generic radio type paid to lend his jack-of-all-trades Stentorian voice to hockey. It is not commentary he offers, but rather stale chestnuts like "What goaltending!" and "Robin Hood and his merry men are up to it again", phrases respectively overused for great saves and turnovers in the previous Gretzky games. Graphically, Olympic Hockey retains Gretzky's jejune color palette, bright reds and yellows and greens, all atop bluish ice. Natural ice has a bluish hue, yes, but hockey ice is white, Midway, and it is painted as such. The teams, as you might imagine, are truly slapdash, their uniforms not corresponding to actual IIHF (International Ice Hockey Federation) logos of the time but instead consisting simply of the flag of the nation in question pasted over the attendant colors. The Canadian team even has white pants, an unprecedented uniform choice in men's hockey.

What would Gretzky have to do

To don to Kazakh greenish-blue?

Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 is not entirely devoid of merit. It features, for instance, an option for trading players, which may seem odd for a game in which players represent their countries of origin. Here, Midway did come through with an innovation, renaming "trades" as "defections." Now, instead of selecting the players you wish to trade, you select the country you wish to “defect” from, and then the nation to which you wish to "apply for asylum". This makes for some interesting ludo-narrative scenarios. What would Wayne Gretzky, a national icon of near demi-god status in the Great White North, have to do to have to defect from Canada and apply for asylum in some place like Kazakhstan? One would assume it would involve at least a #MeToo-related transgression, or more realistically some kind of pedophilia, perhaps. In this way, Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98 raises some intriguing hypothetical questions.

Speculations about Wayne Gretzky's sexual proclivities are not enough to save Olympic Hockey Nagano ‘98, however, for the game fails on too many other levels. Midway tried to exploit the 1998 Nagano Olympics, but they wound up failing even in the art of exploitation. The fundamental maxim of exploitation is that you can judge a book (or a movie, or a video game) by its cover. Instead of gracing the cover with a Gretzky or a Hull—hockey standouts from the two countries representing the most viable markets for the game—Midway instead decided to go with a generic Russian goaltender for its box art. Sorry Midway, but that Cyrillic script written on that goalie's jersey—the authentic Russia jersey, I might add—branded your game as a write-off right from the get-go.

NHL 2K5

Hockey in the 1980s was better than it is now. You had a sport led by matchless, unequivocal superstars, most obviously Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux, each of whom put up previously unheard-of numbers, the former eclipsing the 200-points mark four times, and the latter falling just a point short in 1988-89. Gretzky and Lemieux took full advantage of play that was more wide-open and freewheeling than today's restrictive defensive style would ever allow. Teams were content to win 7-5 rather than 2-1, and even unknowns like Blaine Stoughton and Al Secord and Rick Kehoe had 50-goal seasons. Hell, Dennis Maruk, whoever that is, netted 60 in 1981-82. In short, the goal-mouths were well-fed. As a consequence, the eighties were the Dark Age of Goaltending, as goalies still wore reasonable amounts of padding along with sight-hindering yet aesthetically haunting plastic-molded masks (think Friday the 13th). The NHL still carried teams based in exotic locales like Hartford and Quebec City, and they all seemed to have endearing, unrivalled logos (the whale-fin W and the igloo-ish thing shaped like a lower-case “n”, respectively). And if you're Canadian, then all throughout the eighties you saw teams from your country in the Cup Finals virtually every year. In fact, a Canadian team won the cup six times in the decade; at present, it looks as if a Canadian team may never win the Stanley Cup again. In the nineties, Sunbelt markets and American capital took over the national sport of the great white north, and as a cold symbolic reminder, advertising now clutters the boards in every arena—boards which were, in the eighties, snow white save for the puck-marks etched thereupon.

Sega's ESPN NHL 2K5 allows you to relive this most glorious decade in hockey history, among others. Unlike its contemporaneous competitor, EA's NHL series, 2K5 includes “classic” teams—namely Stanley Cup champions from select years and other notable teams such as the finalists they defeated. Now you can play as the irrepressible 92 Penguins, the dynastic 82 Islanders, and the unstoppable 84 Oilers, possibly the greatest team of all time. Most of these teams are unlockable by way of points earned through in-game achievements, but some are available right out of the box. Other than the players who were still active at the game’s release, like the indomitable Mark Messier, most players on these classic teams have numbers and positions filling in for their names. However, NHL 2K5 contains a robust player-editor wherein you can rename players. Virtually any name that has ever appeared on the back of an NHL jersey is recognized by the game's audio, so you can hear many a legendary appellation announced after a goal-scoring play. In a dazzling deke around licensing legalities, these names include “Gretzky”, so you can even have the Great One leading your 84 Oilers back to the Stanley Cup. The player model doesn't really resemble Gretz, but the dominant playing style certainly does, and you're almost guaranteed at least a two-point performance every time he suits up. Adjust his hair to mullet-length (an option the player editor affords you) and he passes. Mullets aren't the only mark of authenticity. For added retro effect, there's even a “historical” rink which features boards sans advertising and the old pre-Meggnet 3-shaped nets that prevailed in the NHL before 1985. Think of NHL 2K5 as NHL 84.

Even though 2K5 is over a decade old, it is still highly playable, holding up against even NHL 18's overelaborate analog stickhandling system. 2K5 relies on what is essentially a two-button system—”pass” and “shoot”—and in this way allows for a much simpler, more gratifying experience, attaining to the action-based feel of NHL 94, the standard by which hockey video games are judged. Ironically, 2K5 does NHL 94 better than EA ever did in its many attempts to put “retro” modes in recent NHL games. Between the classic style and the classic teams, NHL 2K5 is like a time machine, taking you back to better days when hockey and hockey video games were actually entertaining. And as a bonus, you can even have the 1970s experience, playing with the helmetless heroes of the Boston Bruins and the notorious Philadelphia Flyers, better known as the Broad Street Bullies on account of their unfettered pugnacity.

Unfortunately, the roller derby-esque (if not Rollerball-esque) atmosphere of seventies hockey does not shine through quite as brightly in 2K5, owing to the game's lackluster fighting engine. While fights happen in abundance (almost as many as in the original NHL Hockey), it gets tiresome watching two players square off to throw non-impactful, meekly-animated jabs at one another. Fights in 2K5 lack all the stick-and-move (-and-don't-slip) strategies of hockey fighting, which are much better-captured by its overdog competitor, NHL 2005. This is really the only thing NHL 2005 does better than 2K5. To most people's tastes, NHL 2005 probably has the advantage in graphics, too, as the 2K5 player models tend to look like generic Neanderthals. This peccadillo, however, also works with the old-time hockey aesthetic—indeed, weren't hockey players of the past more than a bit troglodytic? Apart from that, announcer Gary Thorne's used-car salesman voice may wear a bit thin in terms of commentary, but you can always turn him off. Do that and you're left with a near-perfect, timeless hockey classic.

NHL 13

NHL 13 is a triumph for feminism.

While the game is little more than a roster update for previous iteration of EA's juggernaut hockey franchise, the game features one new revolutionary roster possibility: the ability to create female players. The female option in the character creation suite logically follows from the game developer's forward thinking efforts to include two renowned real-life women's hockey players—American Angela Ruggiero and Canadian Haley Wickenheiser—as playable characters. Ruggiero is a perennial Team USA standout, and Wickenheiser is a living legend. A four-time winter Olympic gold medalist in ice hockey, Wickenheiser will go down in history as the first woman to score a goal in men's professional hockey. She did so while playing for the Finnish HC Salamat club in 2003. She also went to the Summer Olympics for softball. She's retired from hockey now, and is currently in medical school. What have you done with your life?

Now, faced with all this sheer human will that Wickenheiser embodies, you may be shirking and rationalizing, as people often do when they hear of someone with superior abilities. You may be saying, "well, technically Manon Rheaume was the first woman to play men's hockey, as a goalie in the NHL, no less" just to sort of take Wickenheiser down a peg. But without taking anything away from Rheaume, she played but one period of an exhibition game. While Rheaume was a bit of a sideshow, Wickenheiser had a regular shift.

But Manon Rheaume has left an indelible mark in her own right, at least upon your correspondent. This reviewer must confess that, for whatever reason, all the female players he has created are goalies. Don't think of it as sexism, however—it's far more complicated than that; possibly something to do with the palpable domestic associations of the net, which the goalie "keeps" as if it were a house. Manon Rheaume stands are the archetypal den-mother, the keeper of the net in the fullest sense.

All that being said, the female create-a-player options are limited. While the user may choose from dozens of heads in shaping their male characters, there are only three available for women: pretty blonde with pig-tails, character-nosed brunette with pigtails, and striking woman of African-American descent. Where are redheads? Where are the flowing tresses? The only real modifier is eye-color, and you have a half-dozen or more of those to choose from. It's not really enough, however, to build a team, unless you're content with a preponderance of pig-tailed look-alikes.


While NHL 13 commands high praise for its move toward gender impartiality, the game has all the usual pitfalls of the EA NHL series. It has none of the simplistic, blistering intensity of NHL 94, the remote-past benchmark of the series, as NHL 13 relies on analog-stick shooting, skating and stick-work. This system, while elaborate, relies on improbable feats of stickhandling and reduces a purported hockey “simulation” to a sort of deke-porn mini-game. Play on the equivocal "NHL 94" settings, ostensibly a throwback to the classic game, and your options are limited. The player is left with little control over whether to slap or wrist the puck, as the computer seemingly chooses for you, and stick movement is impoverished. There's not even a turbo button, a staple of EA's 16-bit hockey classics. Since the AI plays defensively, consistently shutting off the interior of its own zone, you'll mostly have to settle for long shots, and games will inevitably turn into defensive struggles, the winner usually determined by lucky goals. But then again, doesn't this sound like an accurate simulation of present-day NHL hockey: vigorously conservative and defensive with winners and losers largely determined by bounces?

The only consolation is that the game includes a version of Wayne Gretzky convincing in both the looks and talent departments who's available right out of the box. In this way, NHL 13 hearkens back to a more compelling NHL of yesteryear. Maybe it’s the promises of a more compelling NHL of the future that makes features like the inclusion of female characters in NHL 13 so appealing. These exemplary women allow us the fantasy that hockey is capable of being changed.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam

In 1998, Sammy Sosa was all at once everywhere. A man of humble roots, Sosa emerged from penurious origins in his native Dominican Republic and arrived in the major leagues on the cusp of the 90s, initially gaining some measure of fame for this evolution from a svelte base-stealer into a perennial thirty-homerun hitter as a member of the Chicago Cubs. Then, with little if any foreshadowing, the summer of ‘99 saw him on pace to break Roger Maris's record of 61 homeruns in a season. He would eventually eclipse that mark with a staggering total of 66 dingers at season’s end, but he was beaten to the record by Mark McGwire, who hit his fateful 62nd on September 8 against Sosa's Cubs and would wind up with the new and otherworldly benchmark of 70. Whether second-best or not, Sosa’s Herculean homerun total transformed him into duly vaunted superstar and, more crucially, a bona fide commercial commodity. His adorable face-rending smile found its way into ads peddling Big Macs and Pepsi-Cola, among other precious consumables. His power-hitting prowess even landed his image on the cover (and his name in the title) of 3DO's also-ran PS1 offering Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001. But one game was apparently not enough for the man who had hit a full five more homeruns than Roger Maris, for he also took the starring role in High Heat’s companion release, Sammy Sosa Softball Slam.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, as its hyper-alliterative title might portend, is not a good game. Its foremost failing is its resemblance to the High Heat Baseball series. Those games were notorious for their atrocious graphics, which managed to be simultaneously jagged and blurry, blocky and faceless. Their only saving grace was their fairly realistic AI, which lent itself to progressively better simulations from year to year. With Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, however, all those appealing aspects of real baseball are gone. In their place are softball—that is, slo-pitch softball—sensibilities: viz. sandlot diamonds with chain-link backstops and chalked circles instead of pitching mounds, slab-thighed people in either jeans, shorts and sweatpants playing for teams representing greasy spoon diners, labor unions and accounting firms. The gamer has the choice of playing gendered or co-ed, but the latter, quite fittingly, is the default. Players have tags like "Big Lou" and "Burger Boy." Many of them are endomorphic in shape. In terms of gameplay, throwing errors abound. In view of these hapless facets and the overall blue-collar, working class aesthetic, the game is an accurate simulation of softball. However, inexplicable arcadey trappings like flame trails on homeruns inject jarring disjunctions of surrealism into an otherwise brutally realist game. Mr. Sosa's own team, “Sammy's Slammers”, is another disjuncture, in that its female members are, to a woman, pneumatically-bosomed. Even more bizarrely, the game features a character editor which includes the option of, at a press of the square button, turning any given player into Sammy Sosa. You can, if you so choose, make Sammy Sosa every player on every team. All told, these elements turn the game into a mockery of softball, which is sort of redundant, as softball was already doing a fine job of self-mockery.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam leaves us with more questions than answers. Why did Sammy Sosa lend his name and cherubic smile to this proletarian abomination? Certainly he’s not the first athlete to endorse an appalling videogame at the lure of cash. Still, the bigger conceptual question remains: why is Sammy Sosa playing in the slo-pitch league depicted in the game? We can only tender hypotheses. Perhaps Sosa’s fictional foray into softball speaks to some deep-seated urge for lower middle-classness that lurked within the man even during the height of his celebrity. Maybe it relates to some latent guilt that stemmed from his alleged steroid use: as he grew more and more superhuman in both home run hitting and in sheer sinewy physicality, he became increasingly desperate to re-connect with the unpretentious, grassroots folk from whose stock he originally emerged. So intense was this desire that it led Sosa to approve of—perhaps even encourage—the idea that he not just participate in a slo-pitch softball simulation, but actually permeate it with quasi-divine omnipresence in his ability to incarnate as every slo-pitch player on every slo-pitch team, pervading all games on every slo-pitch field. The desperation, then, manifests as a largescale narcissistic fantasy, its attendant grandiosity taking on nothing less than a theological scope.

Perhaps Sosa's paramount blessing was finishing as runner-up to Mark McGwire in the homerun race. Because he never held the homerun record, the fact he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs has not tarnished his reputation as markedly as it did for McGwire or, for that matter, Barry Bonds. Sosa’s second place finish ensured that an asterisk needn't ever be superscripted next to his total of 66 homeruns in 1998.* But with his eponymous Softball Slam, we see that Sammy Sosa flirted with—perhaps even lusted after—something much lower than second-best. That is, he wanted to be closer to the working man and woman, and the pale simulacrum of baseball that (like video games themselves) allows such people temporary reprieve from their deplorable workaday lives.

Less distressingly, Sammy Sosa’s Softball Slam may offer a more positive takeaway, especially when we consider its player editor feature. Maybe the message is that within every single average Joe and Jane who plays softball, there is an exact replica of Sammy Sosa in his prime—we just need the right cocktail of Human Growth Hormone to unleash it.

NOTES:

*That asterisk could, however, be applied to Sosa's 2003 statistics, as it was in that year that he was caught playing with a corked bat.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the rights to the image of Sosa and spouse included above. However, it is my vague understanding that civil law protects parodic materials. This image is, quite clearly, self-parody, either consciously or unconsciously, and on those grounds its usage in this article is, in my estimation, fair.