Here we have another one of those more odd episodes of The Angry Video Game Nerd where instead of focusing on one particular game, he spends time discussing a whole category of games which follow a similar theme – in this case, sports games on the Atari 2600!
While certainly not mine, or the Nerds “cup of tea” sports games are something you can’t ignore in the gaming world, much like you can’t ignore sports in real life. It’s just something most people care about, for some reason, and James doesn’t get it any more than I do.
He opens by addressing the fact that he hasn’t really covered any sports games before, and goes on a bit of a mini-rant about them, especially the Madden series, alongside the nations general obsession with Football on a whole. It’s a rant that I’m glad someone made, even if it’s just for the sake of comedy in this episode, as it makes a good point and does act as a nice lead in to the Atari sports games starting with plain old Football!
The episode doesn’t spend much time on any one game – it’s a quick look at around 19 games from the pre-NES era. Some of them good, some of them bad, and some of them hilariously bad. He covers the gamut from Football to Baseball to Boxing to Hockey to Racing to even Golf, all taking crack where he can at the bad games, and complimenting the good ones where they deserve it.
Final Rating: 4.0/5
It’s rather nice to see an episode devoted to something as relatively obscure as sports games for something like the Atari 2600. I always enjoy content with a pre-NES focus, and this is no exception, even if it is about sports games. Some of them, honestly, are fun, while others you can at least see what they were trying to do. The episode acts as a simple comedic look at the origins of sports games, a genre that would grow to dominate gaming, regardless of how you feel about sports themselves.