OS Roundtable: Recapping a Generation of Individual Sports Games

[pietasterp]

Golf games used to be pretty serious business, back in the days of Links on PC and PGA Tour, Nicklaus, etc... Now the genre is pretty much dead on the vine. I hope it's not a harbinger of things to come for sports games in general, but I still go back and play some of the PC Links games (and the single excellent original XBox offering) and then lament how far we haven't come in golf games. If only there were some competition out there somewhere...

[woody2goody]

UFC 3 is one of my favourite games - however the big mistake with that one was not using simulation stamina levels online. That could have removed 90% of the online idiots in one fell swoop, but they didn't do it, stuck with arcade and thus online was awful. What a great roster that game has - up there with WWE '13's roster for depth.

The Codies F1 games have had positives and negatives. F1 2010 was a very good foundation - nice graphics, decent AI and an enjoyable career mode - they lost their way in 2011 by not fixing the unequal online cars and also the game graphically was a disgrace on the PS3. 2012 was a lot better in many ways, most of all the handling, but still the framerates on PS3 were unacceptable when you see what GT5 or even GTA5 can produce on the same hardware. Probably won't get 2013 but I look forward to next-gen F1.

Top Spin 4 was very good, still some things need to be more random to make a great game of tennis. The worst thing was the roster. Tiny.

As for Fight Night, 4 was the best one. The story mode in Champion was very well done, but to me the Exhibition AI was broken - the CPU just punches too much and it's almost impossible to have a sim fight like you could on FNR4.

I have Tiger Woods '12 with all the DLC courses and to me, as golf changes a lot less than nearly every other sport in terms of players and venues, that game is all I need for my golfing fix. A great course selection, a nice roster of golfers and the freaking Masters means that even when next-gen comes along it will take something special to make me buy another golf game.

WWE '12 had very good in-ring gameplay but a poor story mode. WWE '13 had the one-count glitch but a very good mode with the Attitude Era and the best roster I've seen in any fighting game. The community creations - where you can download other users' created wrestlers is a gamechanger - when it works. THQ did build a solid foundation and with 2k at the helm fully from next year's game I expect great things from the wrestling series.

[misterkrabz]

The newer Tiger Woods games are not any more fun and don't do anything better than the games they released 5 years ago (or longer). Matter of fact, some of the older TW games are actually better IMO. Nothing "wow'd" me from year to year with that franchise.