Tag: sports games

2349: Arcade Golf…?

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To my surprise, the game I’m enjoying most out of the Neo Geo collection I got recently is Neo Turf Masters, a golf game. Now, I’m not averse to a good golf game at the best of times, but I’m really surprised and impressed with how well Neo Turf Masters adapts the standard golf game format to a (relatively) fast-paced, challenging arcade format. It really works!

Neo Turf Masters is pretty simple and straightforward as far as golf games go. You don’t have to worry about things like elevation when driving your way up the fairway, just smack the ball in the right direction and make sure it doesn’t land in places it shouldn’t. When it’s on the green, line up with the hole and hit the button when your power meter is around the same point as the handy mark showing where you should hit it. Repeat.

It’s refreshingly simple, even as the more cartoony golf games (such as Sony’s Everybody’s Golf series) adopt more complex mechanics, and it works really well for a quick game of golf. Despite the simplicity of the basic mechanics, the game instead provides most of its challenge through some surprisingly fiendish course designs and an extremely unforgiving structure designed to keep you pumping coins into the arcade original version. (Of course, on the port you can simply continue as many times as you like, but this isn’t really in the spirit of playing arcade games.)

No, Neo Turf Masters’ biggest challenge comes from its unusual “lives” system. You begin the game with 3 lives or “holes” and spend one of these lives any time you get a Par. (For the non golfing-literate, this means putting the ball in the hole in the exact number of shots the hole’s Par says.) If you get a Bogey (one more shot than the Par) you spend an extra hole on top of this. But if you get a Birdie (one fewer shot than the Par) you not only don’t lose the hole, you get an extra one to add to your stock. I haven’t seen what happens if you do worse than a Bogey or better than a Birdie because my skills at Neo Turf Masters are thoroughly average.

I really like this system, though. It has the arcadey addictive quality of wanting to “1cc” (1 Credit Clear) it without using the Continue function, but considering I can only make it to about hole 4 or so before getting a Game Over, I feel it may be a while before I can manage a full round yet. Still, this is a game designed very much in the old-school mould, where you couldn’t just plough through it from start to finish — you had to get good at it. And that’s fine! If you could just hammer straight through it would be back on the shelf in less than a couple of hours; with only four courses on offer, there’s not a lot of “content” (as modern gamers like to say) here, but it will sure as hell take you a while to master the game and its courses enough to be able to clear each of them.

Easy to pick up, difficult to master, then; something of a mantra for retro games, arcade games in particular, and I can see that the Neo Geo library, regardless of genre, very much seems to be designed around this particular philosophy. And I like it!

#oneaday Day 893: The One Thing That Would Make Me Play a Sports Game

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I’m not a fan of sports, as I believe I’ve made abundantly clear on numerous occasions. Consequently, I’m not a big fan of sports-based video games either (though I am rather more tolerant of them than televised sporting events, largely because I get to interact with them and have fun with friends — but the point stands).

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. I think there’s scope for sports games to reach out to people like me and provide an accessible experience that I could enjoy — and potentially learn to be interested in the sport itself over time. I caught a glimpse of such a concept in practice today when checking out a Facebook-based game called I AM PLAYR, a rather nifty little game that casts players in the role of an individual player on an up-and-coming (and fictional) football (soccer) team. The game focuses on the life of the player’s character both on and off the pitch, splitting the player’s time between 3D training minigames, text-based matches punctuated by interactive 3D attempts on goal by the player character and full-motion video sequences with occasional moral choices to make. While the latter may sound rather late-90s CD-ROM in nature, it added a huge amount of personality to the experience and actually made me interested to play more.

The reason I don’t find sports games very interesting, you see, is that there’s no sense of narrative or drama. Sure, there’s an argument to be made for emergent narrative in sports games just as there is in abstract strategy games, but when I’m not interested enough in the source material I’m never going to become invested enough in the game to start thinking of things in emergent narrative terms. As such, it turns out that the very thing I needed to get me interested in playing a sports game was a story.

I AM PLAYR sees the player character following a number of off-pitch narrative threads alongside the season’s fixtures. We see the behind-the-scenes drama as the team’s lead striker who claimed he was fighting fit was actually receiving injections from the team’s therapist. We see rivalry between teammates — practical jokes, drunken nights out, ill-advised encounters with vapid glory-chasing women. We see the team’s manager trying to stay positive even as the drama unfolds within his team. And amid all this, the player character makes choices that determine how different characters react to him — including his girlfriend, who is more than a little concerned that his new-found fame will see him drifting away from her.

It’s a really neat system and made me feel far more attached to my character and the team than if they were simply a collection of stats and a polygon representation on a virtual pitch. I don’t know enough about how to play football effectively to be able to play a full match and win, so I’m grateful that the actual “sport” element of the game simply focuses on set-pieces and chances on goal, and then allows me to get back to the clubhouse intrigue.

After playing the game for a while I was struck with how rarely this sort of thing is seen. I AM PLAYR has high production values — all of the video is shot with real people on location, including some actual real footballers, for example — but there’s no reason a team couldn’t do it slightly more on the cheap with CG characters and text-based dialogue if the budget wasn’t there. So why aren’t more people doing it? I’d certainly play it, and I’m willing to bet there are plenty of people out there who have a casual interest in football (but not enough to play a full simulation of it) who would join me.

It doesn’t just have to be limited to football, either. This formula would work for pretty much any sport. You could have the motorsports game where you developed rivalries in the pit lane. The baseball game where you’re trying to follow in the footsteps of a childhood hero. The tennis game where you’re struggling to come to terms with your own anger management issues. (You cannot be… etc.)

There have been examples in the past — On The Ball from Ascon for MS-DOS computers springs immediately to mind, and apparently New Star Soccer for iOS follows a similar template — but I want to see more of this kind of game. They could be the catalyst to actually get me interested in a sport and be able to participate in a conversation come international tournament time, rather than simply wanting to snap off every England “car flag” I see.

The trouble with Arsenal, you see, is they always try and walk it in.