I’m as excited as anyone forMLB 14 The Show on PlayStation 4, EA Sports UFC,Madden, NBA 2K and others, but I wouldn’t be a greedy sports gamer if I wasn’t pining for the sports that are under represented,
Think about it.
There are sports out there that you simply can’t play in a new video game.
Consider this my personal plea to the EA Sports, 2K Sports, Sony and Microsoft’s of the world.
Here are four sports that need to make a video game comeback…and soon.
Boxing
The last boxing game for a console came out in 2011. It was EA Sports Fight Night Champion. Since then boxing gamers have been forced to play mobile incarnations of their favorite sport.
Most of them aren’t very good.
While FNC wasn’t perfect, it was still pretty solid, and in my opinion, the best boxing video game ever made.
Some might argue that’s like being the skinniest Fat Boy (shout out to Prince Markie Dee). Still, it was something. Don’t think for a minute that the Fight Night community is dead.
EA Sports has been smart and gracious enough to leave the servers for the game in tact. The hardcore gamers are still throwing hands on line.
Not only are fans still scrapping, they are also still creating and sharing fighters. This past Saturday, Showtime had a stellar boxing card on tap. The main event featured the ageless wonder, 49-year-old Bernard “The Alien” Hopkins defending his IBF light heavyweight title. He was in a unification bout with WBA champ Beibut Shumenov. With the use of Fight Night Champion’s GameFace and Boxer Share features, you can download user-created versions of Shumenov.
We made our own version of the fight.
Now that game was made five years ago.
How amazing would a current-gen version of the game look today? Take a look at EA Sports UFC, which drops on June 17, to find out. I almost wet myself as I pondered the concept. Somebody, anybody, please make us a boxing video game. Thanks.
College Football
OK, so its only been about nine months since the last collegiate football game released, but because the NCAA Football series has been cancelled, I’m already going through withdrawal.
You may or may not know the whole collegiate licensing issue that helped lead to the cancellation of the series. In a nutshell, the NCAA is a group of greedy suckas who are pimping college athletes. They want to earn inordinate amounts of cash for the revenue scholarship—and non-scholarship—athletes generate, but don’t want to share any of that dough with the kids.
Part of that revenue is the money acquired from video games. College games have always used numbers and no names for players, but it’s always been quite easy for gamers to tell who is who. All that crap basically led to the game being snatched away from us like a hungry baby nursing on the milk of our pixelated mother.
So, the very dope NCAA 14 that released in July 2013 might just be the last college football we see…ever.
That makes me sad.
Want a pacifier? For however long this works as a satiating factor, there are valiant young—and old—gamers who are updating the rosters to allow diehards the ability to play with 2014 rosters. If nothing happens to change things this time next year, there will probably be 2015 rosters for NCAA 14 then.
It’ll have to do for now.
Hopefully one day, we’ll see real names, and the players will get paid a portion of the very real money they bring to these universities. (Drops the mic and walks away to play some NCAA 14,)
College Basketball
Perhaps 2K Sports saw it coming like Ice Cube. They stopped their College Hoops 2K series after College Hoops 2K 8. See, and you thought it was because Greg Oden was on the cover.
Talk about a cover curse.
EA Sports kept making their March Madness series until 2009. Now, like the football scene, we have nothing. To be honest, I don’t miss this as much until March. Once the whole bracket talk begins, I just wanna pop in a college basketball game and have it. I end up dusting off College Hoops 2K8, but the further we get from the game’s 2007 release date, the harder it is to play the game with its dated graphics.
It’s like slowly going blind.
Take a look for yourself:
All the players look like they ate a really large powdered donut. There’s inexplicable white, chalky substances on their faces. Perhaps they’ve been hanging out with Tony Montana.
At any rate, I’m pissed. 2K Sports has shut down its servers, so there’s no way to update and share rosters. There are little contraptions you can buy to get the saves in other ways, but that’s too much work. I already have a job.
It might be like spitting in a tornado, but I’d really like someone to make a college basketball and football game. Leave the sucker completely customizable. Let me make my own conferences, schools, players, mascots, the whole nine. Sharing might be a legal issue, but hopefully some group of millionaires will risk a portion of their wealth for us.
Lacrosse
I know you didn’t expect this one. There’s never been a major console release for the sport of lacrosse. there’s been Xbox 360 arcade titles like NLL Lacrosse, but nothing on a disc.
You may not be a fan of the sport, but its pretty fun to play in a video game. Mind you, these visuals are dated and functioning on a lesser-powered platform, but this is a glimpse of NLL 2011:
OK, so it isn’t pretty, but it could be.
There’s no league preventing developers from coming up with a lacrosse title. It would have to be like $29.99 tops, and it would need some decent promotion to sell more than like 20 copies, but you gotta start somewhere.
Stir Fry Games developed NLL 2011 and it was published by Triple B Games. They did make the game in 2012, but the crew hasn’t touched the sport since. What’s up with that?
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