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think that what the person above said about simulation is dead on. They're sim games. I don't play flight sim games, or other types of sim games. I know how real life works -- I can get that on normal TV without spending any money. So why play a simulation of football when the real-life stuff is often much better, and more entertaining? If I'm going to play games, I want to do things I can't do in real life.
They are only sims to a certain extent. I play hockey 3 nights a week in the winter, play baseball twice a week in the summer and golf all other days in the summer. I am not fat, and I am not lazy.
The thing is, I cant out skate Pavel Bure in real life, I cant shoot as hard as Al McKinnis, I cant snag grounders as well as A-rod, and I cant hit the golf ball 190 yards with my 7 iron out of 3 inch rough like Tiger can. So even though sports games may be sims, they are in no way a reflection of the average persons abilities when they play the sports for real. The games allow me to be Tiger Woods or Mario Lemieux, to play at a level I cant in real life. When I play NHL 2003 I am ingulfed in the action, I am part of the game, I for that brief moment am playing in the NHL.
IMO it is no differant than playing golden eye. When I play it I am a spy, a secret agent, with a pile of cool toys. Now in real life I could probably attempt the same things, but I am guessing the results would be no where near as favorable.
Maybe there is a need to like sports, especially the sports that you will play in the games. However I cant be sure because I like sports, so I cant see from the other side of the story. I will say this though. I hate watching basketball, I hate playing it in real life, but I do like playing the video game version, the same goes for soccer. So I am not sure if I really buy the "I dont like sports angle".
I guess at the end of the day it is about choice and preferance. If you dont like sports games so be it, but to say the games suck because they dont appeal to you is just plain ignorant. I also find it irritating when people say that companies simply rehash the same game every year. When I see a quote like "Madden is the same game every year, only a moron would buy it every year", then the same person says they own Monkeyball 1 and 2. I find that severly hipocritical. The games are differant, EA spends all year on the new titles, the people who make the game live the games and are truly fans of the sport involved. To say no effort went in to it is a slap in the face IMO, and is in most cases unwarrented.
In the end sports games are reason I still play and follow the gaming industry, for Nintendo to lose all its sports games would be the end of me owning a nintendo system and I have owned every one of them. I would miss a lot of Nintendo's great work like Zelda and Mario, but I would rather miss them than the sports.
Just one gamers point of view.