Tennis is a difficult sport to bring into video game form. It’s not because the sport itself is mechanically challenging. Compared to the likes of football it is limited both in terms of the number of players competing and the expansive flow of the game. And compared to something like baseball the physical dynamics are not as complex. Tennis is,…
Every so often a new sport gains traction. It usually starts as a casual hobby activity, but then people being people find a way to make it competitive, and before you know it sponsors and organisations get involved and BAM, you’ve got a professional sport. The challenge these emerging sports…
I’ve been puttering around with Big Ant’s Rugby 25 for a little…
I love playing cricket on the go. I think it’s because of…
Of all the major sporting events, the Tour de France must be one of the most challenging concepts to adapt to a video game. After all, you’re looking at courses that are hundreds of kilometres long, and take hours to cycle across, with the scenery changing up and down mountains,…
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For some decades now, wrestling game fans have been seriously limited in game choice, with only titles produced around the dominant brand, WWE – such as WWE 2K23 easily available to Western audiences. However, the publisher of WWE made a huge misstep with WWE 2K20, dropping Japanese developer, Yukes, in…
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What is it with sports video games and card-based modes being the focus? I do understand that sports and cards go together fine. I used to collect basketball cards myself. But I always thought the appeal in those was the tangible collectability (and potential value) of them. Apparently, there’s something…
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Since AFL 23 launched a week ago, patches have been released nearly every day. The game was released in a poor state (note: as I noted in that article, I have in the past worked with Big Ant, the developer of the game, though I have not had any association…
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I know that AFL isn’t a sport that matters much to anyone outside of Australia. So this is one of those rare articles where we remind readers of just how Australian we are by writing about an AFL game. AFL 23 launched this week and the response can be tactfully…
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Some good news for the Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand racing fans: one of the leading esports competitions for racing games is open for local competitors for the first time. The Ferrari Esports Series is a six-month-long racing tournament that brings together serious racing game fans from Europe, North America…
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To all the big AAA publishers out there: if you are going to insist on monitoring our play sessions for every second that we play your thing, make sure your servers are rock-solid. Having to re-log into a golf game every two or three holes because a server disconnection throws…
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As a baseball simulator, MLB The Show 23 is barely different to last year’s iteration. Even by the standards of annual sporting franchises, this one comes across as having the lightest of touches to improve the experience. The commentary cut in with the same comments at the same moments that…
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I was almost going to skip past this year’s MLB the Show 23. Partly because I’m still playing last year’s edition, and… well, no, that was the only reason. I am still playing last year’s iteration and I don’t see any value in the iterative annual upgrades of sports games…
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Annual sports game refreshes all tend to get a little stale over time, but few have had such a fall from grace as we saw out of 2K Games’ WWE line of games back with WWE2K20. The shift from Japanese developer, Yukes, to US Studio, Visual Concepts, led to one…
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