AMusings

I am one of only two or three people that I know personally to have finished multiple 162 game seasons in baseball games. (I didn’t even make the playoffs in one of them. That’s how dedicated I am.) I can still play 16 games worth of Madden. It only takes a weekend. On this fine Monday, I would like to tell you about my personal history with maybe the most underrated aspect of sports: The video game.

My favorite Christmas was the Christmas of 1994. I was in 5th grade, and hoping against hope that Santa would reward my year of being good with a Super Nintendo. Obviously, the Super Nintendo would be nothing without the greatest game in the world: John Madden Football. So that was another reason for not lying to Mom or upsetting my baby sister for 365 days.

Santa did indeed reward me with these gifts, and my world of entertainment was changed forever.

Prior to Madden ’95 for SNES, my sports video game experience had consisted of RBI Baseball, which to me, is maybe the greatest game ever made, and Nintendo Baseball. That was the name of the game. Nintendo Baseball. There were no names of the players, only cities. Every player had the same figure and number. There were two pitches: fast and slow. I’m not 100% sure how I played that game for as long as I did, but I did.

Nintendo was the start, at least for me. The three games that stick out from my memory from my Nintendo days were the aforementioned “RBI Baseball”, “WCW Pro Wrestling”, and the greatest hockey game ever made, “Blades of Steel”.

Why did I love these games? Well look at all of the great things they had. WCW Pro Wrestling let you pick from 12 different WCW stars including Mike Rotundo and Sting. You could play a steel cage match, which, due to the wonderful graphics of the early 1990’s, caused the wrestlers to disappear momentarily when they ran near it. What else could I need?

RBI Baseball was amazing. You could bunt for God’s sake. Is there more needed? The teams had names, and so did the players. It was unheard of.

Blades of Steel though, that’s unbeatable. For those of you who have not had the privilege of Blades of Steel, here’s what you are missing: To start the game, the team you chose would skate out onto the ice with their opponents, skate around the rink, and then line up on the blue line. This in itself had already made it ahead of it’s time.

As you played the game you found you could fight. Yes, that’s right. If you were checked too hard, you could fight. Amazing.

In between the 2nd and 3rd periods, you got to play a shooting game on the big screen of the scoreboard as an added bonus. These were the things dreams were made of.

Now I, as many people my age, still find myself playing video games…well, playing them is a stretch. Few people can actually play a 16 game season in Madden without simulating at least two or three games in hopes of hurrying to the draft.

Sometimes I wish that we could head back to the simpler times of sports’ video games when the only option you had was to play the game. You could not manage, general manage, draft, etc. While a lot of these features are a great deal of fun (who doesn’t love trying to trade two middle relievers for an outfielder?) I miss the actual gameplay.

Take for instance the upcoming “Legends of Wrestlemania” video game. When I was growing up, the ability to play as Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, Ric Flair, The Ultimate Warrior and Shawn Michaels all in the same game would have been unbelievable. Now, in this newer age of games that are full of bells and whistles, I’m worried about whether the game will include their original entrance music.

And how about the wii? The whole idea of a video game is to relax. There was never any intention of video games to be healthy. Now I can’t golf or bowl without waking up in the morning and wondering if I blacked out and broke my arm in some bar brawl. I don’t want to be tired after playing a video game, I want to be relaxed. Big difference.

I don’t want to have to be concerned about my salary cap, my attendance, how happy my fans are, which tv contracts I have, how happy my players are, or when my contract is up. I want to sit on my couch, controller in hand, and play a video game. That’s all I want to do. That’s what I grew up doing, and that’s what I want to continue to do until the day I die…and if I keep playing the wii, that day might be sooner than I thought.