With Oscar season finally upon us, there’s no better time to (once again) use Hollywood’s long history with gaming as a creative crutch. This time, we take a look at games positioned as legitimate sequels to movies (whether by design, or simply by dint of being the closest thing we’re likely to get) before talking about Broken Age, Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition, and Candy Banner: The Crush Saga. We also try to guess games by their user reviews, and then take a look at what you’d do if you could turn this year’s Oscar-nominated films into games.
Question of the Week
What’s your favorite sports game, “realistic” or otherwise?
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Actually my favourite sports game is the WWE series (If it counts?) Sure the graphics need a major face lift but the game play and controls are tighter than a hipsters pants. One of my all time favourite features in the WWE series is the creation suite. The fact I can make a burley, ginger southerner and call him “Big Mother Trucker” then take him to the ring and have wrestle anyone like John Cena or Zack Ryder is extremely rewarding.
Also the huge rosters (Particularly in the latest one) are the bomb mainly because it’s the only place where a CM Punk/Savage match can ever happen 🙁
Sorry the the lengthy answer but I just love the series so fucking much!
If I had to pick out one game in the series I enjoyed the most would have to be the one that just came out.
qotw :
Bowling, on the TI-83 Graphing calculator. That and “drug wars” were the only things that got me through some of my more boring high school classes.
Space Jam. No reason other than childhood nostalgia.
I remember buying after seeing the movie with my cousins, and all of is having a blast for weeks. Then GTA Vice City came along.
I was always more of a fan of extreme sports games like THPS and SSX when I was younger.
If I had choose a favorite I would go with SSX3, played that game for hours because there was just so much to do across the 3 peaks the game had to offer. Also at the time it looked fantastic and ran at such a smooth rate which made the simple act of carving your board in snow feel really good. The moment that defined it for me was at the end of the game you do a 30 minute run of all the peaks in the game while the choice cuts of the soundtrack (“Poor Leno” by Royksopp and “Gone Home” by Chemical Brothers) played. In general the use of sound was sublime. For example when you went off a super high jump the soundtrack would dynamically fade out until it starting to fade back in based on your distance to the ground.
Also really enjoyed the new SSX and think they got a lot right but SSX3 is still my favorite for the reasons mentioned above.
SEGA Soccer Slam. I’m still wishing there would be more games like that as an alternative to Mario Strikers games.
I seem to be in the minority of Laser Time Network listeners, in that I am actually a huge sports fan. Some of my best childhood memories involve playing sports games with my brothers: NBA Jam, Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (SNES version), NBA Live 95, the NCAA Football series, etc. etc.
What lies at the top of the list, though, is Mario Golf for the N64. To this day, it is the only game I can ask anyone to play and know for a fact that I am going to beat them. My brothers and I still play it on a consistent basis with Street Fighter-level competitiveness as we are the only people who can even challenge each other at this point. It is honestly one of my all-time favorite games.
Your not alone my Nebraskan brothah’
Sports nerds for life!
Oh I’m a huge sports fan, played baseball and football all through high school. I just never cared much for sports video games, save the occasional drunken game of Madden 😛
QOTW: A few years go when i was first getting into the nba and becoming a fan, I decided to take a chance on a recent basketball game that I had heard was pretty good: NBA 2K11. Needless to say i freakin loved it and become a fan of the series (I now also ‘get’ the buy-the-new-madden-every-year mentality know). And know, partly because of 2k, i’m now a huge basketball nerd.
As a sports fan who hates all sports sims because I find them completely uninteresting, and don’t care about “the most realistic sports experience” my favourite sports game is Mario Strikers.
Runner up goes to NBA Jam, and NHL Hitz.
QOTW: Super Mario Strikers for the gamecube. While I am a mild sports fan, I can’t stand the realistic sports games (especially soccer), so this insane, power up fuelled Mario soccer game was pretty fun to me. The sequel (Charged I believe) was good enough too, but I feel like the idea didn’t really need to be repeated.
alternatively, Blades of Steel.
Blitzball from Final Fantasy X
Yes, I know it gets a ton of flak from people, but it really is the one sports-related game that I’ve ever enjoyed. One because it reminded me somewhat of water polo, which is the most fun I’ve had playing a sport in real life. But most importantly, because it plays nothing like a sport, and more like a weird RPG/strategy game. That, and I loved the music that played during any match.
I would go with the good old Midway standbys of NFL Blitz and NBA Jam.
Favorite sports game would have to be NFL Street 2. This made it bearable to have to pretend to enjoy sports in highschool.
If you count snowboarding as a sport, then SSX3 by far. Great controls, awesome soundtrack.
I’ll go with MLB The Show. I liked playing baseball as a kid, but watching it has always been extremely boring. This game series actually gave me a lot of respect for the sport. Batting in that game can turn into a real mind game as the count changes. You only have a split second to determine whether you should swing or not and this has lead to the most intense moments of any sports game I’ve ever played. Pitching becomes fun because you get to be in the driver’s seat attempting to play mind games with your opponent. This leads to a far more engaging game than any other sports title I’ve played.
It would be nice if the sound clips were played after the name of the game was given, since more often than not the talk goes on for a while before someone realizes the title hasn’t been mentioned, and the listeners have no idea what’s being talked about if they haven’t played it.
My local skating rink had a Goonies arcade game, that would start playing without paying if you kicked the coin box with your skates on. I remember liking Goonies 2, and I know I beat it back in the day, but I don’t remember having a guide. I’m sure it would drive me crazy, today, though.
This podcast isn’t interactive or a sequel, the title is misleading.
100/100 would bang
I really enjoyed this episode, but now I have no desire to listen to it again.
0/10
It’s been a long time since I’ve played any sports game of any type, but my most favorite of the one’s I’ve played was NFL Blitz for the N64. That was a long time ago, but boy do I remember how fun it was despite the fact that I lost. To this day I never remember laughing so hard while playing through a game due to some of the tackling that happened.
My favorite memory form that game was that my brother had made a touchdown and his character was jumping for joy. Turns out I was a giant black dude right next to him, and anyone who knows this game knows of the ability to still use your character after a pitch is over, so I went over to his cheering character, literally picked him up and threw him back first to the ground, followed by repeatingly hitting the tackle button allowing my character butt first to slam into his character. I was able to do this three to four times before going back to the strategy screen. I looked at my brother afterwards with a satisfactory smile on my face and he said to me: “Really?”
To this day I’ve had so much fun playing sports game like that, mainly because I mainly play other types of games, but that will always be a favorite.
I may be one of the few people who remembers this, but there was a video game sequel to The Incredibles. It was the Incredibles 2: Rise of the Underminer, and I believe took place directly after the ending of the original movie.
QOTW: My favorite sports series is the Tony Hawk line of games. I put a LOT of hours into the TH games and while there were some low points (looking at you American Wasteland), they were always fun enough to play through them.
I would love to see Neversoft come back and make a new game, but since there is no chance of that ever happening, I’ll just have to stick with the older THPS games I still have.
Force Unleashed is awesome.
You’re wrong.
You’re all wrong I say!
I’d like to add that even though the lightsaber crystal changing didn’t make a lot of sense, you could make a black lightsaber, which is all kinds of awesome.
I will second that. The story alone makes it have more merit than the entire prequel series, not to mention that it also slots in really nicely into the established canon without any difficulty.
The Vidjagame crews complaints about it (outside of gameplay) seemed to consist of 1. It shouldn’t have actually tried to expand upon the universe and should have been some side story instead, and 2. that it makes Luke look pathetic in comparison when Starkiller is throwing around space ships with the force. I don’t really see how either of those are credible strikes on it. Why not tell a story that actually matters if Lucas is behind it? And of course Starkiller is going to look better than Luke considering the advance of time and the fact that a game has to have escalation to be interesting. And really the stuff Starkiller pulled isn’t shit compared to the absolutely moronic wank Luke gets in the EU (which is another story entirely and pretty dumb).
That quiz was hilarious, and had me looking like an idiot on the train.
Especially with XCOM: EU having a misleading title. That was a fantastic user review.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_IGHAUeXwI
I have to say my favorite sports game is a tie between Skate 3 and 2.
I like Skate 3 because it was more realistic and I could make lines that looked really technical and precise. I like Skate 2 because I can go on the mega ramp and try to get a double backflip, also a better soundtrack.
Speaking of Star Wars VHS’s, I found a CBS/Fox box set of the original trilogy from 1990 in a box on the street a while back.
BMX XXX
I don’t have to explain myself http://i.imgur.com/vYntsSA.gif
I don’t know if it counts, but I thought of the Blade Runner computer game that came out in 1997. It was a pretty involved adventure mystery, not a recreation of the movie, but not really a sequel either, at least in the sense that it was a new Blade Runner, rather than Deckard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_(1997_video_game)
I hate sports games, but if boxing counts, it has to be Ready 2 Rumble for the Dreamcast…
My favorite sports game was Pro Wrestling for the NES. Played many hours with my friends. The game was great and didn’t need any help from WWF or WCW to move copies and they coined the phase “A WINNER IS YOU”.
Though I didn’t actually expect any of you to have actually played this game, the first game that came to my mind when hearing the Top 5 this week was The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer. For everyone wondering where their sequel to The Incredibles is, here ya go. It picks up immediately where the first one left off. Mr. Incredible and Frozone are the only playable characters, and the rest of the family is nowhere in sight for the whole game. All you do is fight generic robots, there’s almost no human enemies at all. Needless to say, it was pretty terrible, but I was a stupid kid so of course I played it 14 times.
GTA 5 Golf minigame – Not only is it a fairly decent golf game, it’s the only one I know of where you have to drive your cart to each ball and a missed put can lead to a rage quit that involves a car chase, being shot down by a fight jet, parachuting in the mountains, and finally being mauled to death but a cougar. That my kind of golf game.
N64 Ken Griffy Jr.’s Slugfest. “Hi, I’m Ken Griffy Jr. Welcome to my world! It’s-It’s-It’s…It’s Showtime!”
I don’t watch or play baseball, but it was amazingly fun to get drunk and stoned and play the shit out of this game with buddies. Although most of the fun came from imitating the opening dialogue.
Does Niddhog count? Fencing is a sport right? Alright fine, I’ll go with mario tennis, the GBA one or the gamecube one, they’re both damn good tennis games.
My favorite sports game is the Neo Geo version of Super Dodgeball. It is also my favorite Neo Geo game at the moment. Giant beautiful sprites, cool special attacks, basically a fighting game mixed with dodgeball… this game is amazing.
I realize it’s technically a prequel and not a sequel, but I can’t believe you guy’s Top 5 didn’t have Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay on it. Not only is it the best movie game ever, it’s totally considered canon.
So much Force Unleashed hate. I thought that game was great. I thought the story was good, and the gameplay was a fun God of War knockoff.
QotW: Super Punch-Out!!
…yay!
Fifa14. Haven’t been this addicted to a sports game since that piece of shit MLB2k9 which I played so much I almost %100 achieved at it. Not at life apparently. Fifa14 so fun. 14 out of 10.
P.S. 5 stars for Anne and her steam reviews segment. Top 5 was great. Whole podcast was great.
it’s barely a sports game, but i played the shit out of ssx tricky. i got it for my 13th birthday in 2005 I KNOW I KNOW GOD DAMMIT IT MAKES ME FEEL WEIRD TOO and got real good at it, put it down for years and came back in november 2010 and beat the CRAP out of my old scores. i go back to it every once in a while now and i’m surprised how well the muscle memory sticks for me, after just a few runs after months or a year off i’m almost contending with my high scores again. i like ssx 3 as well, but tricky is goofier and takes itself less seriously, and i like how it doesn’t automatically spin you the right way down to land near as much as 3 does, so it takes a bit more skill. i tend to get bored of 3 pretty fast when i go back to it because of this.
my highest Showoff score on garibaldi (the funnest track imo) with yo boy mac is about 1,796,000, if anyone has one better than that GET AT ME BREH. it’s definitely one of those few games that i pride myself at being really good at.
NFL Blitz for the xbox (the first xbox) by far was the best sports game ever created. I wasted many hours playing that game playing with my friends. with all the cheats that you can put in (unlimited turbo, big head mode, and so on) it made for some crazy games. not to mention that you can knock down other players after the play is over. I love blitz!
‘NFL Extreme’ for the PS1. It wasn’t as arcadey-slapstick as NFL Blitz but also not as asperger-like-simulation as the Madden series.
Just a straightforward foot\ball game where if someone cheap-shots you, you’re allowed to get up and spitefully clothesline them like you would in real life.
PS. I should mention my other favorites are Mutant League Hockey and Arch Rivals for the Genesis. Maybe I’ve got a problem…