The Best Sports Games Ever Made

Tackleberry said:
NHL99 would be it for me. Through much modding and hard work, i'm still able to play it on modern equipment. Still fun.
Click to expand...
I have NHL '99 for Playstation. It's still the most recent EA Sports NHL game that I have. It's fine but I think the simple graphics of the Genesis NHL games have aged better and, if I want to play a turn of the millennium era 3D NHL game, I have Sega Sports NHL 2K for the Dreamcast.
 
  • Like
Reactions: Judge Dredd
Links LS golf was the absolute shit back in the day. Was the first real golf simulator and had so much free content you could download that users created. And you could play it with a keyboard and mouse pretty well, no need for a fancy roller ball or anything. The leagues were endless fun although I suspect some people were cheating.

Ken Griffey baseball on the 64 is another classic. California Games on the NES was great. Tecmo Bowl obviously. More recently Rocket League and the OOTP and FM games are all great, although the simulators have niche audiences you can set them up to be as detailed or as hands off as you like.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Judge Dredd
/thread
WWF_Wrestlemania_2000_N64_cover.png61AKYUlSiNL.jpg
 
  • Like
  • Feels
Reactions: Thiletonomics, Asian tech support, Judge Dredd and 2 others
Mario-type sports aside, NBA Jam and NFL Blitz are pretty high up, though DoA Extreme is okay and Wii Sports was kinda fun.

The N64 wrestling games were fun if you count those. Even the PS2 ones were still pretty solid. I can't think of much more. Oh, Tony Hawk games (especially THPS4).
 
thejackal2 said:
Links LS golf was the absolute shit back in the day. Was the first real golf simulator and had so much free content you could download that users created. And you could play it with a keyboard and mouse pretty well, no need for a fancy roller ball or anything. The leagues were endless fun although I suspect some people were cheating.

Ken Griffey baseball on the 64 is another classic. California Games on the NES was great. Tecmo Bowl obviously. More recently Rocket League and the OOTP and FM games are all great, although the simulators have niche audiences you can set them up to be as detailed or as hands off as you like.
Click to expand...
yeah I def recall farting around on the demo of one of the dos links games and having a lot more fun than golf should have been
 
  • Like
Reactions: thejackal2
sasazuka said:
Even if you're like me and you don't care that much about real world hockey, NHL '94 is a blast to play just for how fast-paced and responsive the gameplay is.
Click to expand...
Tackleberry said:
NHL99 would be it for me. Through much modding and hard work, i'm still able to play it on modern equipment.
Click to expand...
I remember hearing one of the old NHL games (I don't know which one, I think the Sega one?) is still modded and has an active community playing the game to this day.

Jonah Hill poster said:
They don’t make baseball games like this anymore.
Click to expand...
I think there's a new Super Baseball game on the Switch, no idea if it's any good, but the dates line up.

A Rastafarian Skeleton said:
/thread
Click to expand...
SSj_Ness said:
The N64 wrestling games were fun if you count those. Even the PS2 ones were still pretty solid.
Click to expand...
No Mercy made Wrestlemania obsolete. It's a shame that the first wave of carts had a bug with save games. Though I have more nostalgia for Wrestlemania since I played it a lot at a friend's house. The UK version of Wrestlemania didn't have blood though, which sucked.

The PS2 had some great wrestling games, they even managed to break away from the Aki games in terms of mechanics and still be good. I enjoyed them, but somewhere along the way they got a bit a bland and samey and never really recovered.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SSj_Ness (Yiffed)
Judge Dredd said:
No Mercy made Wrestlemania obsolete. It's a shame that the first wave of carts had a bug with save games. Though I have more nostalgia for Wrestlemania since I played it a lot at a friend's house. The UK version of Wrestlemania didn't have blood though, which sucked.

The PS2 had some great wrestling games, they even managed to break away from the Aki games in terms of mechanics and still be good. I enjoyed them, but somewhere along the way they got a bit a bland and samey and never really recovered.
Click to expand...
It's been too long to remember which N64 ones I had as a kid, I know one was WCW vs NWO. I played several and they were all a blast honestly.

I did hear wrestling games got pretty bad at some point, probably after PS2. Last one I played was Raw vs Smackdown 2005. It was pretty damn cool as a teen, and I can't believe I thought these janky polygonal models were hot lmao


The music is kinda dated too, but it's still good stuff, fits the game well.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Judge Dredd
Bog-standard Poster said:
Deathrow on the original xbox was the best sports game ever.
Click to expand...
Something relatively unique about it was that it had a story/storymode.
Onni Kalsarikännit said:
Had to look it up. It was Nintendo World Cup.
Click to expand...
Oddly enough that is a sequel to River City Ransom rebranded to tie in with the 1990 soccer world cup in Italy.
sasazuka said:
NHL '94 is a blast to play just for how fast-paced and responsive the gameplay is.
Click to expand...
For us NHL95 was the big one where everything came together. Ice Hockey on the NES is also really fun in its simplicity and absurdity.

Track and Field 2 was also really fun.
trackandfield2.jpg
It wasn't just a button masher, there was a lot of things going on in that one!
trackandfield21.pngtrackandfield22.jpgtrackandfield23.jpg

The PS1 version was also really good, by far the better game, but it didn't have that many events and it was released at the point where paying full price for an arcade game was getting hard to accept.
trackandfieldps1.jpg
 
  • Like
  • Informative
  • Winner
Reactions: Pee Cola, Whoopsie Daisy, BSC and 1 other person
SSj_Ness said:
Last one I played was Raw vs Smackdown 2005.
Click to expand...
Judging by the UI and release date, I think that's the last one I played as well. I don't know if the games got worse, or if real life had just moved on meaning I had no friends that wanted to play much. It feels like previous games we played for years, but annual releases feel disposable now.

Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
It wasn't just a button masher, there was a lot of things going on in that one!
Click to expand...
I wanted to try the official London Olympics game, mainly as a as a keepsake, but also because it was supposedly track and field without the button mashing. I don't know how they accomplished that. My guess is either timing or lots of swing meters.
 
  • Agree
  • Informative
Reactions: SSj_Ness (Yiffed) and Smaug's Smokey Hole 2
Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 said:
For us NHL95 was the big one where everything came together.
Click to expand...

I know many people prefer NHL '95 on the Genesis to NHL '94.

They're very similar games at first glance.


The big difference is that NHL '94 used the same graphics engine as the first two games with minor upgrades while the graphics were re-worked entirely for NHL '95 and the ice surface is noticeably wider (you can see less of the stands at the sides of the screen compared to NHL '94). It seems like adding a couple dozen pixels' at most worth of width to the ice surface shouldn't matter that much but it threw me off completely when I rented NHL '95 so I was content to stick with NHL '94.
 
  • Informative
  • Like
Reactions: Smaug's Smokey Hole 2 and Judge Dredd
The best video games for every sport, in my opinion:

Football - Pro Evolution Soccer 6
Football Manager - FM 2010/CM 01-02
American Football - Tecmo Super Bowl
Basketball - NBA Live 2003/NBA 2K11 or 12
Hockey - NHL 2001
Baseball - Front Page Sports Baseball Pro '98
Wrestling - No Mercy/VPW 2/Fire Pro Returns
Racing - NFS 5/F1 99-02/NASCAR Racing 2003
Tennis - Virtua Tennis 4
Chess - Lucas Chess/Chessmaster 9000
Golf - Links LS 1998
Boxing - Mike Tyson's Punch Out!!
MMA - UFC Undisputed 3
Snooker - Virtual Pool 3
Track and Field - Track and Field for the NES
Horses - Probably some Japanese betting sim from the 90's.
Sports That Don't Exist IRL - Windjammers
 
  • Winner
  • Like
Reactions: Judge Dredd and SSj_Ness (Yiffed)
Onni Kalsarikännit said:
Yeah but ISS let you have your own player or edit existing players and FIFA at the time was never as cool as ISS bc in ISS you yourself could be part of the Brazilian squad and beat up minor nations 4729:0.
Click to expand...
In the early 2000s, ISS/Pro Evo were leagues ahead of FIFA, the gameplay was just superior in every way. Hard to describe to someone who hasn't played the games but FIFA was just a clunky mess with shitty physics. Pretty much everyone preferred Pro Evo and while I knew some people that had both FIFA and Pro Evo, I didn't know a single person who had just FIFA or preferred that series of games. I guess you can boot up an emulator and try yourself but I really wouldn't recommend playing any FIFA game from the PS2 era.

At some point FIFA finally got their shit together and started putting out decent games, I can't remember when exactly, probably around 2007 or 2008 and have been the premier football series ever since as far as I'm aware, the only time I ever hear about Pro Evo these days is people reminiscing about PES 5 on the PS2 or something.
 
  • Informative
Reactions: Judge Dredd
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back