So when a secret lays hidden for years, if not decades, the impact of the discovery feels so much stronger than simply Googling for cheat codes. Sometimes these Easter eggs are found by hackers obsessing over lines of video game code, others are discovered purely by accident, and still others were spilled by developers who simply couldn’t keep a secret any longer. Whatever the case, these secrets, codes, or glitches are a reminder that nothing stays hidden forever – sometimes it just takes fifteen years to find everything a game has to offer.

Final Fantasy 9’s Nero Family sidequest

In Japan, there are a series of strategy guides called Ultimania. If you’re not familiar with them, they’re some of the most exhaustive video game guides in the world, with rundowns of every quest and item, interviews with developers, and more. Naturally, Final Fantasy 9 got the Ultimania treatment in Japan. In America, we got… well, probably one of the worst strategy guides ever designed. Written by BradyGames, the “guide” was essentially a paid advertisement for Square’s PlayOnline service, forcing you to enter keywords on a website for tips on how to do basically anything in the game.

Because the BradyGames guide is one of the most worthless things ever printed on paper, the Nero Family sidequest (opens in new tab) effectively went undiscovered in the West for over a decade. It wasn’t until some GameFAQs posters (opens in new tab) noticed an incredibly convoluted quest in Ultimania that was never mentioned in the North American guide, and tested it out for themselves. Solving the quest is a lengthy, laborious process, requiring players to go to the Tantalus hideout on disc 4 to meet with members of the Nero family, complete an event or boss fight, head back to meet another member, then repeating the process several more times. Completing the quest will net you a Protect Ring – not a huge reward, but hey, sometimes going on a previously undiscovered journey is more valuable than the destination.

Play as Master Hand in Super Smash Bros. Melee

Super Smash Bros. Melee released in 2001 as a launch window title for the Nintendo GameCube, and it wasn’t until 2008 that someone discovered a mind-blowing secret – there was a way to actually play as Smash Bros.’ imposing final boss, Master Hand (opens in new tab). Of course, the reason why it took so long to figure out and replicate is because activating the trick requires a very specific and totally unnatural set of controller commands to be input very precisely. If you’ve done it right, you’ll have pulled off what’s known as the Name Entry glitch.

First, you need to plug a controller into port three of your GameCube. Then, you point your cursor over the name field on the character select screen and hold A and B. Release A while holding B, scroll down to the Name Entry field, and press A again while still holding B down. It’ll probably take more than a few tries, but if done properly, you’ll be able to play as Master Hand, complete with all of his powerful laser and grappling moves. Unfortunately, other players won’t actually be able to defeat you because Master Hand was never meant to be a playable character, and you run the risk of causing your game to freeze, but none of that matters when you’re flying around the screen as a giant glove.

Halo 3’s hidden birthday message

Bungie loves packing its games to the rafters with secrets and Easter eggs, and the studio isn’t afraid to get real weird with how it hides them. Case in point: one of Halo 3’s longest buried secrets was hidden right in front of players’ noses, and wasn’t found until 2014 – seven years after Halo 3’s release. The secret? A birthday message from a developer to his wife (opens in new tab).

The only way to find this secret is to boot up a copy of Halo 3 on December 25, head to the title screen, and hold down both thumbsticks. The main menu should dissolve and a large, translucent Halo ring will start to form in its place. If you look closely on the edge of the ring, you’ll see the words “Happy Birthday, Lauren!” appear in dark, blocky letters. While this appears to be the last secret hiding in Halo 3’s depths, there’s no real way of knowing – Bungie is intentionally keeping mum, preferring to leave any other potential mysteries lingering as a question mark on one of the most beloved first-person shooters ever made.

Mortal Kombat’s hidden diagnostic menus

The Mortal Kombat games were full of hidden characters, special fatalities, and so many other secrets that describing how to pull some of them off makes all those other weird video game urban legend cheats seem plausible. Like the one in MK2 that requires you to press down and start the moment a digitized image of the game’s sound designer appears and shouts “Toasty!” so you can fight a hidden character named Smoke – these games were filled with stuff like that.

One particular cheat remained so hidden that it took over twenty years to uncover, only being found after some adept hackers pored over the arcade cabinet code. They found that if you press the player one and two block buttons in a specific order on Mortal Kombat 1-3’s arcade cabinets (the order is different for each game), you’ll unlock a special diagnostic menu. Dubbed the EJB Menu (opens in new tab) after series creator Ed J. Boon, these screens allow players to instantly access every fighter’s ending, turn on free play, display the word ‘Hello’ on the screen, and more. 

Metroid’s “Everything” password (NARPASSWORD)

Veterans of the original Metroid on NES remember the struggle to collect everything in the game and finish it in enough time to see the best ending. Countless hours were logged by thousands of players, but all of that could have been avoided knowing what we know now: all this time there’s been a password that unlocks everything in the game right from the start.

Because of the fail-safe built into Metroids password system, it was near-impossible to know that NARPAS SWORD0 000000 000000 would be the savior to many Metroid fans desperate to see the final credits. Thanks to this wonderful thing we call the Internet, the beauty of NARPAS SWORD or NAR PASSWORD or however you interpret it can be shared among the masses, making one of the most difficult NES games ever made a little more manageable.

LMD in Donkey Kong for Atari

Perhaps the most well hidden Easter Egg appearing on this list, I’m not sure anyone would have even noticed the three letters that could appear on Donkey Kong’s title screen even if they met the parameters accidentally. Of course those parameters are ridiculous anyhow: set a specific high score, die by falling, set the difficulty to 4 back at the title screen, and let the intro loop play.

What was so secret that such a complex method of discovery was needed? What could possibly need to be hidden for 26 years before someone finally found it, and only then after the developer tipped us off to its existence in a blog post? The developer’s initials, LMD, which will appear at the bottom of the title screen. That’s it. I don’t mind the initials; if I had the chance to hide my initials in a game I’d totally do it, but the work it takes to see them is just crazy. No wonder it took 26 years.

Goldeneye 64’s Line Mode

For years Nintendo swore that the only cheats available in Goldeneye were those we had to unlock through playing the game. There were no button sequences to be found, Nintendo maintained, and any attempts to figure some out would be futile; that is, until players actually did find button sequences that unlocked a ton of cheats, including some not available via the normal unlocking method.

One of those cheats, line mode, is the only non-unlockable mode in the entire game and turns the entire game into the music video for Take On Me by A-Ha. It’s a nifty little mode that doesnt really add anything to the experience (except 80s flashbacks), but the fact that it exists at all after Nintendo’s insistence is amazing in itself.

Wesker’s Desk in Resident Evil 2

Who’s going to check the same location 50 times after the first time tells you there’s nothing useful there? Apparently someone somewhere did while playing Resident Evil 2, and thats how the discovery of Film D was made. What’s on the film that took 50 searches to dig out of Wesker’s desk? A photo of Rebecca Chambers after a pick-up game of basketball. What a treat.

We know that this hidden gem was officially revealed in a book called Research on BioHazard 2 Final Edition in Japan the same year RE2 launched, but we’d bet that North American players had no idea this existed until years had passed. If it weren’t for that book, I STILL don’t think we’d have found it today, almost 20 years after the game released.

Chris Houlihan room in Link to the Past

In case you’re unfamiliar, the Chris Houlihan room is a hidden area in Zelda: A Link to the Past named after a 1990 Nintendo Power contest winner. It’s basically a fail-safe that the game sends you to if the game is going to crash, but what seems like an inconsequential addition was once one of the Zelda franchise’s biggest mysteries.

Because the game launched back in the days before the Internet, no one even knew the room existed. The World Wide Web is what brought this place to light, only becoming widely known twelve years after the game initially launched in 1992. Anyone who stumbled upon it before that probably thought the game was haunted by someone named Chris and tried to perform an exorcism on the cartridge; or was that just me?

Wave Race Blue Storm’s jerkface announcer

Wave Race: Blue Storm for the GameCube hides a comical Easter egg where the announcer turns into a half-interested, overly-sarcastic jerk. Things you’ll hear him say include “you have chosen poorly” at the character select, “if you were any good, you’d get a turbo by hitting the gas when the light turns green at the start of a race”, and “you don’t have an inferiority complex; you’re just inferior” when he REALLY wants to be a jerk.

The game initially launched in 2001, but it took nine years and an intrepid NeoGAF forum member to discover this antagonistic announcer because of how well hidden he is. First, you have to change a display on the Audio Options menu to vertical fog, then put in a long code of button presses, THEN go back and start a race. Surprising as it may be, I totally understand how this guy could have stayed in the shadows: who would think that rising fog would lead to this jerk?

Deus Ex: Invisible War’s Flag-Flushing Disco

Deus Ex: Invisible War admittedly does not live up to the quality of the original game, but this Easter Egg is too good to pass up. In the final level, pick up a flag and take it to a toilet in the bathroom, then flush said toilet. You’ll suddenly be warped to a rip-roarin’ party at Club Vox with all of the major characters in the game getting down with their bad selves. For a game as serious as Deus Ex, this is quite the surprise.

This is another Easter Egg I’m surprised we ever found, because getting to the disco dance party takes some really weird steps. I’d bet that most people didn’t look at those flags in that bunker and think to themselves “You know what? I’m going to move that to the bathroom. That’ll show that dastardly UNATCO!” Whoever first discovered this, we’re glad you did: everyone should be invited to this party.

Marathon Infinity’s Hangar 96

The Marathon games on the PC and Macintosh are a great example of how Bungie got its start in making great shooters. While the games certainly laid the groundwork for the smash hit Halo series, they also showcased just how well Bungie could keep secrets within its games: they hid an entire multiplayer level within the game, where only the most tech-savvy players could find it.

With a lot of digging, someone finally figured out the key to unlocking the level: finding it centers around combining hexadecimal terms seen on terminals in-game, then turning the combined hex term into readable code and reintroducing it into the game’s files. I have no idea who would even think to try that, as some players (like me) just know how to hit the start button, but the idea of hiding a full map in a game’s code is astounding. 

Splinter Cell: Double Agent’s Seal Rescue

Throughout the original Xbox version of Splinter Cell: Double Agent’s co-op stages, there are a series of hidden side missions where you and a friend must rescue five seals from imprisonment. That doesn’t sound like anything too out of the ordinary, except I’m not talking about Navy SEALS; I’m talking about the ocean-dwelling, balance-balls-on-their-noses animals that clap their fins and make honking noises.

Four years after Double Agent’s release, two of the game’s developers posted a video revealing the hidden co-op side mission, where a team must find and rescue five baby seals using a variety of seemingly inconsequential items. (Here’s a video showing it off.) Without the reveal, these seals might have stayed hidden forever, but I’m glad that we could bring peace to the seal people of Splinter Cell.

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For all their character, though, none share Seven Stars’ flair for stretching the boundaries of Mario’s world. Putting art aside, no other Mario RPG nails the expert pacing of exploration, storytelling, and combat that makes Seven Stars still feel effortless after two decades.

From the moment Seven Stars starts, the game manages to both wholly capture the feeling of the Mario series while also feeling like this is a place where absolutely anything can happen. Mario rushes into Bowser’s castle to save Princess Toadstool–released in March ‘96, her highness was still six months away from being known as Peach outside of Japan–and the whole thing feels like a very literal interpretation of the game’s name. This is Super Mario Bros., the NES game from 1985, with Final Fantasy style turn-based combat. Then a skyscraper-sized sword with a smug, fanged face on the hilt smashes through the roof of Bowser’s joint and suddenly all the rules and expectations of what’s to come are smashed along with it.

Even by 1996, Mario was a character weighed down by perceived rules. Super Mario Bros 3 and World were vivid and imaginative games, no doubt, but they expanded on a base established in that defining NES original. Mario lives in a world where there are killer mushrooms and turtles working for a mohawked dragon man with antisocial tendencies and a penchant for blondes. These facts can be embellished on, but not done away with. Super Mario RPG treats Mario’s past as provincial; everything you’ve seen to date has been localized to just a chunk of the Mushroom Kingdom or Dinosaur Island or neighboring towns. It’s a big old world out there, full of huckster frog sages, cloud princes, and hilariously chubby tiger monsters that get extra licky when you fight them. There are rich beardoesobsessed with beetles living near towns whose sole business is mushroom-themed destination weddings.

While Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi: The Superstar Saga possess some of that diverse spirit in Super Mario RPG, they suffer somewhat from having to adhere to the rules established in their respective series and even in Super Mario RPG itself. The fourth wall-breaking humor that’s a trademark of all Mario role-playing games got its start back in the SNES original when Toad would run out to explain a little bit about jumping directly to the player. That’s no less delightful when it’s deployed in games like Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam, but it’s also overly familiar.

So too is the perpetual need for a gimmick in each new entry; the perspective flipping of Super Paper Mario, the mapping of each brother to a specific button in Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, or the sometimes tedious adhesive collection in Sticker Star. Super Mario RPG succeeded thanks to its inherent novelty–a role-playing game born out of the spare but iconic action of the platformers–but also its laser focus on a great story and great battles.

That’s not to indict the action in either of its successor series, but Super Mario RPG’s battle system is a perfect blend of visual humor, speed, and variety. The signature active turn-based combat started here and it was arguably perfect out the gate. Every weapon for each character requires you to time your button presses to get the maximum damage. Mallow’s Froggy Stick needs an extra button press precisely when he brings it down on some creepy shark pirate’s face. Bowser’s pet chain chomp will start chewing up that thieving purple alligator Croco the moment it hits him in his jaunty hat. Shifting between its five characters, all of them feel useful and specific. It’s hilarious seeing Toadstool wollop a goomba with an umbrella, then turn for a victory pose alongside Bowser and Mario.

The limited character selection in later games loses that pleasurable range, but that’s only half the problem. All but the easiest fights in Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi drag on for ages as they’re both naturally slower paced and overemphasize the active battles (do the Mario brothers’ jump attacks really seem cooler if there are 50 jumps in a row?). The audience participation aspect of fights in Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door are delightful, but having to sit through five full minutes of back and forth to kill just three basic goombas using just two characters dulls any humor and excitement there might be. Super Mario RPG keeps its battles cooking while also feeling just mechanically complex enough to satiate a veteran role-playing game fan.

That brisk pace keeps Super Mario RPG’s lovely adventure moving as well. One second you’re fighting a man-sized dagger named Mack the Knife outside Princess Toadstool’s castle and just a few minutes later you’re following a possessed wooden doll into the jungle to fight a crazy-eyed living bow. Never lingering too long on any dungeon or episode, Super Mario RPG’s laid out with maximum narrative economy and maximum character expression. Mallow’s journey to find his parents doesn’t come 30 hours after it’s introduced, giving you time to lose investment. The whole game takes just 20 or so hours to play through as opposed to nearly double that in most Paper Mario outings. Rather than drown the player in fight after fight, or repeating funny story beats until they lose their impact like in Thousand Year Door’s wrestling sidestory, Seven Stars never overstays its welcome.

So its structure remain and spirit remain sound on its 20th anniversary, but Super Mario RPG’s real ongoing success is that, for the right player, it’s just so damn easy to love. For me, the bulbous, almost Play-Doh-esque characters in their little pre-rendered diorama world feels just right. Mallow and Geno, the martini-swilling Valentina and her swole bird henchman, the endearingly indulgent members of Bowser’s displaced Koopa Troop; everyone you meet in the game is completely defined and impossible to forget. And Yoko Shimomura’s soundtrack? Right up there with her best work in Street Fighter 2 and Parasite Eve, but also of a piece with Koji Kondo’s immortal Mario themes. The game endures, and while many of the key creators that worked on it are still working on the Paper Mario and Mario & Luigi games, their debut remains un-bested by those follow ups. Happy 20th, Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars. May your reign continue unabated.

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Screencheat, out this week on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, is designed precisely around this principle. You can’t see your enemies. You have to watch their screens.

Come meet the developer as we face off against director and artist Nicholas McDonnell of Samurai Punk live at 4:30PM ET/1:30PM PT/9:30PM GMT.

Dig the show? We air twice a week, so make sure to follow our Twitch channel! When are we live? Here’s our schedule:

Tuesday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT GamesRadar+ joins fascinating folks from every walk of life, playing their favorite games and other treasures from the history of gaming. This is you chance to chat with creators from the world of music, film, comics, and everything else under the sun.

Thursday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe that’s why video games seem so remarkable. We meet with the creators of the best games to demystify the process.

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Today Bluth and Goldman joined us to discuss their years of collaboration and why now is the right time to transform Dragon’s Lair into a hand drawn movie for 2016.

Dig the show? We’re here four days a week, Monday through Thursday so make sure to follow our Twitch channel! When are we live? Here’s our schedule:

Tuesday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT GamesRadar+ joins fascinating folks from every walk of life, playing their favorite games and other treasures from the history of gaming. This is you chance to chat with creators from the world of music, film, comics, and everything else under the sun.

Thursday 4:30PM – 6PM ET/1:30PM – 3PM PT Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Maybe that’s why video games seem so remarkable. We meet with the creators of the best games to demystify the process.

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In 2003 the idea of a game split into hundreds of smaller ones, each roughly five seconds long, seemed, well, demented. How could you even learn the controls if, after a single bite, the next plate was thrust under your nose like some slapdash taster course? How could you derive satisfaction from such meagre investment? The design turned out to be not only fruitful – kickstarting an irreverent new franchise for Nintendo that later saw releases on GameCube, DS, DSi and Wii (and soon Wii U with the upcoming Game & Wario: see page 51 for a preview) – but also prescient, predating the ethos that now powers the mobile market. That ethos? Gloriously instant gratification.

The rules were simple. Levels contained ‘microgames’ (presumably smaller than mini-games, but bigger than nano-games), which players tackled at random. You might launch a rocket, jump a shark, score a basket, brush some teeth, pick a nose or use a brolly to shelter a kitten. The catch was that you only had four lives. Let your kitty get wet, for example, and you lost one. The longer you survived, the faster the speed got. Survive a barrage of 20 or so and you advanced to the next level.

Halfway through levels lay boss fights, chances to restore a single lost life. These were slightly longer: you might fight a NES-style Punch-Out!! bout, or fly a spaceship in a top-down shooter, or bat balls from a tricksy auto-pitcher. True to WarioWare, these small, but perfectly formed gameplay nuggets stuck around just long enough to offer a challenge, but never outstayed their welcome. Of course, any videogame lives and dies by how it plays, and thanks to WarioWare’s sheer variety, there were a hundred ways in which it could fail.

Aside from a few duds (catching a falling pole, or hammering A to eat bananas were about as riveting as they sound), there were no glaring weak links. This is down to a host of different characters packing 25 microgames a piece. The hyper-intelligent alien, Orbulon, offered Mensa-lite games that rewarded mental agility, rather than reaction times: remembering a dance sequence, say, or quickly completing a sentence (“This game is a) Stupid, b) Great or c) Ridiculous.”). Mona, meanwhile, geared hers around human physicality: threading a needle, perhaps, or using some eye-drops.

Nintendo fanboy 9-Volt’s set was arguably best, taking you on a whistle-stop tour of retro franchises: you blasted Duck Hunt fowl, dodged F-Zero racers, leapt Donkey Kong’s barrels, killed Metroid’s Mother Brain and, in an even more nostalgic nod to pre-Mazza Nintendo, hoovered a mess with the Chiritorie vacuum cleaner and grabbed plastic balls with the Ultra Hand. Impressively, these microgames weren’t just recreations, but were actual slices lifted from the games to which they paid homage.

Not every character made sense. Dog and cat cabbie duo, Dribble and Spitz themed their games on sci-fi and ninjas, while, erm, ninjas, Kat and Ana, based theirs on nature. Hmm. Elsewhere was Jimmy T, a disco enthusiast with a penchant for groove, so, obviously, his games revolved around, er, sports. In its scattershot way, WarioWare demonstrated another side to Nintendo, sometimes sophisticated, but also content to roll around in the infantile muck (Dr. Crygor’s level takes place over a toilet). Both sides of this split personality informed the story.

Yes, there was a story. One evening, as Wario chills on the couch watching TV, a news report explains how game sales are exploding. So he joins the dots: make games, make money. That’s what the guy’s all about, after all. Developers aren’t known for their bulging wallets, however, so Wario enlists the help of people, pets and aliens to form WarioWare Inc.

That’s as far as the story went, but if you took it to its logical conclusion and introduced a bit of philosophy (stick with us), it made a weird kind of sense. In a way, players adopted the mantle of videogame tester, trial-running each developer’s scattershot demos without the inconvenience of having to type up a bug report afterwards. Or you might say players were unwary focus group sit-ins during some mad brainstorming session, each microgame a sales pitch for a prospective full-fat title. Whatever theory you favour, WarioWare was a lot cleverer than it seemed.

It was a lot longer, too. Five seconds of gameplay isn’t much, but multiplied by eight characters, each with 25 microgames, you have… well, we were never any good at maths. But we do know each one could be attempted in isolation from the rest and this offered a whole new spin. Rather than spend time frantically working out what to do (a one-word instruction like ‘throw’, ‘bounce’ or ‘pick’ was all the assistance given), you knew what to expect and could therefore chase your own leaderboard records. Microgames didn’t just get faster over time, either. Catching a piece of toast was even harder when a few bites had been taken from it; fleeing giant footballs demands skill when two become four. Master these and there was more fun to be had. After conquering a set of each character’s microgames, you’d unlock a longer mini-game to play at any time. Longer experiences, such as Skating Board and Paper Plane, veered even closer to mobile titles of today, the endless runners in the vein of Jetpack Joyride and Canabalt.

So, while WarioWare, Inc: Minigame Mania was indeed a precursor to the undemanding insta-fun downloadables occupying iOS and Android, it was also, in a funny way, a fitting tribute to where it all started: Game & Watch. Like WarioWare, Nintendo’s 1980s LCD portable offered not just one game, but several – 59 games across 59 dedicated models. Titles such as Fire, Balloon Fight and Vermin made self-reflexive cameos in WarioWare, some lifted wholesale, others slapped with fresh paint to keep with a new aesthetic. The whack-a-moles in Vermin, for instance, were now claymation. The game based on Fire, on the other hand, retained the sparse, retro black and white visuals of the original. The Game & Watch was one of several nods: there were also references to GBA, NES, SNES and even that eye-ruining monstrosity, the Virtual Boy.

Regardless of WarioWare’s link to the past or future, it has firmly stamped its own unique mark in time thanks to one all-important reason: it was never boring. This was gaming without the unnecessary bits, pure nuggets of distilled fun. So while WarioWare at first seemed the furthest thing from a videogame, it ironically had more claim to the title than anything before. When you get right down to the meaning of the word ‘game’, past long cutscenes and exposition-spouting characters, past HD graphics and soul-shaking orchestral scores, it’s about a self-enclosed interactive experience. WarioWare didn’t just adhere to that definition, it embodied it, offering not just one tightly focused experience, but hundreds.

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For the old school console fan, 2015 is a paradise of fresh delights. Axiom Verge oozes that classic console feeling when it starts up on PlayStation 4. The grinding wub-wub-wub of the distortion field weapon and its glitchy effects warping the blocky environment seem like they were lifted right out of 1989. The same is true of The Adventures of Pip. Played on a Wii U, the hero’s transformation from single block into increasingly detailed pixel dudes is practically a greatest hits tour through the transitions in tech from Atari 2600 to NES to SNES. Odallus even has those fetching scan lines right on the screen to mimic sitting in front of a CRT television. “Wait a second,” mutters the console purist, gently setting down her Jaguar controller. “Odallus is a PC game!”

JoyMasher’s game only looks like a console game. Axiom Verve and Pip, despite being readily available on those slick little boxes with controllers that never need a keyboard and mouse to operate, also happen to be playable on PC. These games may have been made to ape the ticks and charms that made console games so distinct from their PC cousins in the past, but in 2015 there are almost no tactile differences between games built on any platform. If the specific pleasure of firing up and playing a console game is ubiquitous across all platforms, what defines console gaming now?

Understanding just how incredibly different console games were to one another in their heyday is difficult in an era when XCOM: Enemy Unknown runs as comfortably on a PC and iPad as it does on an Xbox 360. It wasn’t just that each machine had its own style of controller, either; even the noises they made were particular. Consider Sega and Nintendo’s 16-bit beasts. Genesis does indeed do what Nintendon’t but the reverse is equally true. Super Nintendo games used a custom built processor called the S-SMP to generate sound effects and music, resulting in tones with a characteristic warmth. Think about the smooth horn blats of the Super Mario World soundtrack (and the admittedly farty noise made when Mario enters a Koopa castle) for perfect examples of that machine’s audio identity. Sega’s Genesis used a stock sound processor, the Yamaha YM2612. While just as capable of making some bitchin’ tunes, the YM2612 produced a drier, almost acidic tone encapsulated by bruisers like the Streets of Rage 2 soundtrack. Compare the main theme of Chrono Trigger remixed using Genesis sounds compared to the SNES original.

The specificity of the hardware, like the SNES’ custom sound chip and the fact that consoles couldn’t be gradually augmented with more memory made game development on those consoles isolated, but also focused. PlayStation developers had an easier time making 3D games because that console’s processing power wasn’t awkwardly spread out across multiple processors like the Sega Saturn. For 2D games, though, Saturn trounced the PlayStation because of the lack of video RAM in Sony’s box. The differences between those two platforms made the same game feel different depending on where it showed up. Resident Evil’s Jill Valentine is jagged on PS1 but more detailed compared to the smooth, simple character model on Saturn.

Every console had its own quirks, its own identity as well as flow in its games that culminated not just in a house style but also a genuine hominess. Recognizing the instrumentation and sound libraries cohere across multiple Super Nintendo games like Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana let the console itself grow deep roots in a regular player. For any ravenous fans of Capcom’s arcade work in the mid-’90s, the Sega Saturn’s 2D capabilities made it the only place to translate those brief experiences into something lasting at home. Even machines like the Nintendo 64 whose technical abilities seemed like drawbacks on paper could become benefits as you became attached to its specific style. Did the muddy textures and hazy resolution of N64 games make them immortal works of graphical achievement? Hell no, but for the people that love that machine in its games, that smudgy look is representative of everything great about the console. Consoles could have a style that was also a soul.

Games the cross between console and PC today are actually very capable of mimicking the particulars of classic machines like Super Nintendo, but those artful flourishes aren’t a result of using locked-in hardware specifications. Axiom Verge, whether played on a PS4 or a PC, feels like a modern successor to Nintendo’s own Super Metroid, from the chunky biological art design to Tom Happ’s eerie sci-fi music. Rather than milking a specific sound out of a custom chip, though, the soundtrack was made using an old version of SoundForge and Sonar X2. The game itself was built using software called MonoGame. The result is classic console style but what’s ultimately a device-agnostic feel; Axiom Verge was built with those tools precisely so it wouldn’t be confined to a single platform like old console games.

What marks a console game today actually has nothing to do with what’s in the games, but the ecosystem that surrounds them. Each console environment gets its shape in multiple ways. One aspect is the online community. While cross-platform play between PC and console games like the kind Capcom’s building for Street Fighter V is becoming more common, the player pools on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live do remain largely closed and specific. Multiplayer communities, achievements, trophies, and just the simple notifications that someone you know has been playing the same things you have creates a sense of shared experience that gives that specific console a new feel and form.

While the technical proficiencies of the consoles don’t necessarily define their games anymore, what the makers of those consoles choose to fund and create also internally further shapes the culture of that machine. Nintendo and its fleet of mascots are the most obvious example. Modestly powered PCs could run games like Super Mario 3D World without much difficulty – Wii U uses a PowerPC processor not dissimilar to the PC-like Xbox 360 – but that game and others published by Nintendo share. Wii U games tend to be colorful and emphasize action over story; even games made by studios outside Nintendo’s offices like Bayonetta 2 share that spirit.

Less specific than Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft nonetheless have their own content cultures. Sony, for example, has been cultivating the same persona since it got in the game back in the ‘90s. Its publishing slate tends to mix blockbuster savvy with a flair for quiet, weird experimentation. That’s how you have Uncharted coming out of the same pool as Tokyo Jungle and The Puppeteer with a heavy emphasis on individual characters and largely single-player experiences. Microsoft on the other hand has always banked first on big, blockbuster style games that emphasize multiplayer. Halo, Gears of War, and the Driveatar-ridden roadways of modern Forza all have ample space to play by yourself, but they’re sold first as things to play with other people. (It’s hard to find an Xbox One tentpole that doesn’t have four-player co-op.)

For the old school fan, longing for those aesthetic quirks that made console gaming so distinct in the 20th and early 21st century, your options are limited. There’s always the hardcore homebrew scene, where people are even still cranking ZX Spectrum games alongside new NES and even SNES games. They can satisfy, but it’s no easy task to find homemade games that feel as polished as the classics. Games like Axiom and Odallus that pay homage to an era of more specific technology scratch part of the itch, but even games as precise as those aren’t wholly the real deal. Which is fine. It simply means that old console feeling is itself an antiquity, the soul of games as they were, not as they are.

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When I finished Metal Gear Solid, those weren’t the things that I was thinking about. I was thinking about the perilous tightrope of nuclear disarmament; of stockpiles of poorly maintained nuclear waste; of the Chernobyl disaster. I was thinking about how previous generations had nearly destroyed the world, and how, in turn, new generations could still destroy the world. Yes, I was a precocious teenager, but Metal Gear Solid is detailed and explicit in its distaste for nuclear weapons and their proliferation. It wants its players to think about this stuff.

The Metal Gear Solid series has been criticised for trying to shoehorn serious issues into an ostensibly campy, sci-fi series. You shouldn’t, the theory goes, try to highlight the treatment of prisoners of detention camps in a game with a character called Skull Face. The place for a discussion on surveillance and the control of information, it is said, is not in a game that features a techno-vampire.

I disagree. Metal Gear Solid has every right to explore serious issues, just as any form of entertainment should be free to have an underlying theme. If it takes popular culture to bring big ideas to the broader population, then so be it. Plus, isn’t the plurality of tone essentially mimicking reality? The Metal Gear Solid games, much like life, are simultaneously absurd, dramatic, funny and serious.

This tonal patchwork is undeniably effective. As a teenager, I wouldn’t have watched a dry documentary about the ramifications of the fall of the Soviet Union. But I did spend hours talking to Nastasha on the Codec; the game’s ultimate stealth trick being to teach me about the state of the world under the cover of entertainment. Or, to put it another way, a spoonful of REX helped the frightening realisation about the precariousness of existence go down.

It would be one thing if the series was ever exploitative – pulling ripped-from-the-tabloids story ideas in service of a banal attempt at relevance. That’s not the case. In each instance, the game’s theme comes from a place that feels genuine. Individual stories are sometimes handled clumsily – most notably the way the tragedy of MGS 4’s Beauty and the Beast unit is highlighted through their sexualisation. But the occasional misstep shouldn’t invalidate Kojima Productions’ desire to make a point.

Looking back, Metal Gear Solid was a formative game for me. It was released at the right time in my life, and prompted me to look outside the insular world and at something bigger and more important. Metal Gear Solid’s exploration of nuclear weapons, and the tensions that led to their proliferation, eventually led to me studying politics, and specifically the history of the Cold War. More than that, it changed the way I thought about games. The series had a profound effect on my life and my career. For that reason, I’ll always be indebted to the series – specifically its desire to tackle serious subjects.

The post Metal Gear Solid: How a game about robots kindled my fascination with politics appeared first on Game News.

Generally speaking, cheesing is seen as completing a challenge in an underhanded way that isn’t in the spirit of the game, like leading an ultra-powerful boss off a cliff or shooting from a convenient hidey-hole where no one can reach you. In many circles these techniques are poorly regarded – cheesing is often said in the same breath as glitching or exploits, which are really just technical synonyms for cheating. But I don’t see those things falling into the same category, because cheesing doesn’t alter the basic framework of the game by prodding at frayed code. Cheesing a game comes from studying its many details and eccentricities, and using what you find to confront challenges in unexpected ways.

Take, for example, horror-romance-puzzle game Catherine. In between navigating the throes of romantic entanglement, your job is to rearrange the building blocks of a tower so you can create a path to the top. One boss in the game has the ability to change the blocks ahead of you into traps like spikes and black holes. It’s an aggravating segment that you can fail with an errant twitch, unless you realize that you have the ability to undo your last block-pulling move, which also undoes the boss’s spell. You can then hop to the next level and pull out another block before he makes a move, bypassing his cheap tactic with a cheap tactic of your own.

That gets you to the top on your own terms, and it wasn’t by abusively duplicating items or manipulating some other mix-up in the code. By paying attention to how the ‘undo’ function affects the game in less obvious ways and making creative use of what you learn, you’re able to utilize a mechanic in a way you may never have thought of otherwise. It’s not the same as trying to beat a game out of contempt or superiority (opens in new tab). It’s a battle of the minds against a game you respect and love enough to learn it inside-out.

Of course, you have to be open to the idea of the game cheesing back – I had to bite my tongue when a massive, stampeding pig killed me through the floor in Bloodborne. But in the end that means you’re interacting with the game on an even deeper level, which just makes playing it more personal and fun. So next time you snipe Sekrion from above in Destiny (opens in new tab) or goad Ceaseless Discharge into a bottomless pit in Dark Souls, banish the word ‘cheating’ from your mind. It’s just you and the game, having a Gotcha moment.

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‘Excuses, excuses’ – where in the world would we be without them? Probably turning up to all of those social functions we’d drunkenly agreed to, or heaven forbid, actually out using our gym memberships. Eurgh Well, I for one don’t want to live in a world without excuses. That’s what they do in [your least favourite nation] and I’ll be damned if [your least favourite politician] is going to turn us into them! *Rapturous applause*. And how about that local sports team, huh? *standing ovation*

Well, now that I’ve whipped you all up into a frenzy of wide-eyed excitement, it’s time to bring everyone crashing back down to earth, courtesy of my very latest article. This one’s all about video gaming excuses – which ones work best and when to employ them. Oh, and if you don’t like it, I was ill, or really tired, or covered in bees when I wrote it. Whichever one sounds more plausible. Begin!

‘My pad doesnt work!’

Ah mankind, the species for whom oblivious stupidity apparently knows no bounds. Let’s face it, self-awareness isn’t exactly our strong suit. We’ll gladly chuckle at some talent show troglodyte only to wind up on that very same stage, fighting back tears as our all ukulele rendition of Purple Rain goes down like an anthrax sandwich. This unwitting idiocy, this ‘humorous hypocrisy’, if you will, is especially apparent within gaming, particularly as it pertains to the issue of ‘unresponsive game pads’.

Yes, we’ve all gotten a good old laugh out of seeing our buddies scream in disbelief, hoisting up their ‘faulty’ bit of kit to demonstrate which thumb pressed which button at what time – as if their incredulous reconstructions will somehow convince us that they’re in the right. Then of course the exact same thing happens to us and we proceed to perform that very same pantomime. Alas, it doesn’t actually matter if the game flubbed your input or not. No-one’s ever going to believe you.

Success rate – 3% – To be used in the company of overly trusting siblings and/or the elderly.

‘There’s too much lag!’

Lag, or ‘the dance of the juddery ghost men’ as its known to expert gamers, is a form of technological pestilence inflicted upon mankind by the vengeful gods of the Internet. Only by supplicating ourselves to their divine will – their great and terrible moodswings of spotty service – are we allowed to continue blasting our buds online. Praise be to the Internet that sent out its only engineer, that having turned off the router, saw it risen again from the dead after the customary 30 second waiting period. Amen.

As fun-ruining phenomena go, lag is a real killer, and unlike many of the entries on this list, definitely does exist. Still, it’s probably best not to wheel this one out after every minor defeat; we wouldn’t want you to lose all credibility, now would we? Cry wolf one too many times and the townsfolk will only be too happy to see you lining a lupine belly, so save this excuse for only the most egregious of multiplayer muck ups.

Success rate – 60% – Sadly, some folks just aren’t ready to believe anything they hear online, and who can blame them – right now you’re reading an article on how to choose the most convincing excuses, you daring, deceitful rogue, you.

‘I wasn’t ready!’

Here’s one that hardcore ‘excusers’ will recognise from the real world. A time-honoured appeal thats just as prevalent on the squash court as it is in the annals of the inner city knitting society, probably. Sadly, the superior applicability of this fib also proves to be its downfall. After all, everyone’s used it so often by now as to rob it of any kind of credibility. Not only that, but it’s also a tacit admission of your own lacking skillset, a slowness of mind and body – a proper ‘donkey braining’.

Telling your foe that you simply weren’t ready is no better defence than a milk chocolate riot shield, as the members of the Belgian SWAT discovered to their detriment. So, If you’re looking for an iron-clad excuse, something to spare your blushes following an almighty cock up, then prepare to look elsewhere.

Success rate – 10% – Stands a fair chance of convincing during local multiplayer matches, provided your opponent can see your cack-handed inanity in action, but unlikely to cut the mustard online. Either way, know that you use this one the expense of your dignity.

‘The CPU cheated!’

‘CPU’ – now there’s an acronym with a dozen credible interpretations. ‘Computer Punishes Unjustly’, ‘Coded to Play Unfairly, ‘Considers People Unworthy’, ‘Completely Pwns Us’… The list goes on. Its real meaning – long since forgotten following the great clash of Akkator, when the armies of Bill ‘The Bloodlust’ Gates ransacked Silicon Valley – is of no real significance. What does matter is how often this A.I. abomination shows up to sully our good times.

Bot-based bastardry, henceforth to be known as ‘botstardry’ is an ever-present part of gaming, and yet, we as gamers will still call foul on anyone claiming to be so cheated. What ought to be among the most welcome of gaming get-outs is instead subjected to naught but the most eye-rolling of responses. As ever, we grab the chance to knock down our fellow man rather than joining him in solidarity. Something tells me we’ll come to briefly regret that decision during the six-and-a-half seconds it takes machinekind to utterly liquefy our fleshy, cheese-encrusted species.

Success rate – 20% – Credible, though largely ignored, placing blame on the CPU is a lot like telling a jury that your evil twin did it. It may actually be true, but you’ll still have a tough old time proving it. You win again Armando…

‘I’m stuck on the crap team!’

They say there’s no ‘I’ in team, but there are several ‘I’s in “I’m terrible at this game and so are most of my friends, so why exactly did we choose to enter the competitive ranked lobby and subject some poor unfortunate to teaming up with us?”. Finding yourself marooned on the B team is never easy, but then just what are you supposed do about it? Quit and be labelled a big fat quitter, incapable of watching any-and-all Sly Stallone movies in which he makes a big emotional speech about not giving up? Never! So you slog it out instead, trying your damnedest to ‘Mighty Duck’ your entire team to glory. You lose heavily.

Now it seems your only recourse is to complain. After all, being magnanimous will only get you so far when the folks responsible for watching your back are still trying to figure out which end of the gamepad fits into the disc tray. Sadly, being borne on the winds of justice doesn’t really count for much on the Internet, so prepare to be completely ignored, reported and/or cast out like a big whinging leper. Better just to ride out the match and hope for better luck next time.

Success rate – 5% – The other team aren’t about to stick an asterisk next to their glorious win. Likewise, your own teammates won’t want to hear about how they held you back all match.

‘Nature called!’

Nothing says ‘commitment to the cause’ quite like soiling yourself in front of your Xbox. Or PlayStation – I’m an equal opportunities purveyor of poop jokes, and damn proud of it. For the non-crazy gamer, this need to relieve oneself – ideally before turning one’s undercarriage into a less colourful take on Splatoon – is simply too strong an urge to deny. When nature calls, gamers just have to answer.

Being AFK due to IBS is about as good a reason as any for mucking up online. Of course, the major limitation of this excuse is that you can’t just go around using it willy-nilly. After all, no one’s going to buy that you were busy anointing an outhouse when your avatar’s been running around chucking chaff grenades. For a more inspired lie, try telling your fellow players that you were only away for most of the match, thereby making you look like some kind of post-flush wunderkind. Empty bowels AND an 18-point killing streak. We’re simply not worthy!”

Success rate – 90% – ‘Everybody poops’, and most of them will be willing to believe that you do too.

‘The dog ate it!’

Ate what? Don’t know exactly. The console? My gamepad? The Internet connection? Yeah, that’ll do: “Sorry folks but my dog ate the Wi-Fi. Just leapt right up and took a chunk out of it. Snatched those pesky radio waves right out of the air. What do you mean ‘fundamental misunderstanding of the electromagnetic spectrum’. You’re a ‘fundamental misunderstanding of the whatever-those-last two-words-were'”. Alright fine, so maybe this isnt the most watertight of excuses.

Then again, who needs reason when you have a story about a dog, and not just any dog, but the dog – the one kids have been trotting out since the dawn of time in order to take the blame for their ‘misplaced’ homework. She’s the evil equivalent of Lassie, keeping kids ignorant, then chucking ’em down wells. “What’s that girl? You’ve rigged the chamber to begin filling with hydrochloric acid? Gee wiz”

Success rate – 100% – Everyone loves dogs, ergo everyone will want to believe this excuse, however inane it is.

‘Complete schizoid embolism!’

What’s that you ask, some sort of complete mental breakdown? Well err, sort of. This fictional affliction comes to us by way of Arnie action classic (and nasal tweezers commercial) Total Recall. And no, it won’t cause you to begin crying out in guttural Austrian vowel sounds. Instead, the ‘schizoid embolism’ results in the complete brain death of the victim – caused by their inability to determine which reality actually exists and which one boasts three-breasted women, mutant baby slings and the inimitable Michael Ironside.

What better way to paw off a loss than by telling the grinning victor that you’d simply ‘slipped into a paranoid delusional coma state, one in which the very fabric of reality was torn asunder revealing the crushing weight of nothingness’? I’d say it’s worth a shot, at least.

Success rate – 50% – Which side has it right? What is truth? What is a man, but a miserable pile of secrets? GRAUOOOWUGH! *mysterious xylophone music*.

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Games can be a welcome escape, one where we steal cars, fly through space, or become anime lawyers. Yet so many licensed sports games force you to play football, baseball, and soccer the way the NFL, MLB, and FIFA want. Those simulations have their place, but there are too few alternatives if you want to color outside the lines of pro sports. That’s what makes the too-rare alternatives so appealing.

Without world famous brands, unlicensed sports games have to get creative to entice fans, and so they use the classic rules as more of a guideline than a blueprint. They let you kill the referee, play alongside orcs and elves, or ingest every banned substance you can. These games are truly fantasy sports, embracing the possibilities that fiction opens up. So, which titles best took advantage of that open playing field? Read on…

And if any of these games interest you, then you might be able to grab them cheap here (opens in new tab).

Sega Soccer Slam

Despite having Sega in the title, this wild three-on-three soccer game doesn’t feature any of the publisher’s famous mascots. Developed by folks whod later work on Need for Speed, Sega Soccer Slam has similar intensity and speed on display. Its also a bit like Punch Out!! on a football pitch, as friendly international stereotypes battle it out for soccer supremacy. The teams have representatives from each continent, and while their appearances border on caricature, the hard-hitting action is anything but a joke.

What makes it different? The international flavor covers as diverse a group of nations as FIFA, but World Cup commercials won’t feature the level of violence seen in Soccer Slam. Punches and kicks are allowed, while boring rules like onsides and corner kicks are left out to focus on the uncomplicated fun. Who wants to bother with penalty cards when they could see a Mexican wrestler bodyslam a British soccer hooligan?

Blitz: The League

The original NFL Blitz games feel like an anomaly now. John Madden would never approve of the late hits, excessive roughness, and showboating that are all integral to making the classic Blitz games so fun. After Midway no longer had the NFL license, Blitzs mean streak only grew without the ‘No Fun League’ overseeing every play.

What makes it different? Blitz: The League not only amps up the violence that series like Madden prefer to tone down, it also makes time for other seedier elements in the campaign. Drugs, prostitution, and graphic, career-ending injuries are all part of a story mode that’s fittingly presented by NFL bad boy, Lawrence Taylor. It isnt for the squeamish, but Blitz and its sequel offer an alternative to the buttoned down action of EA Sports. The series has since gone out to pasture, but it’ll always be remembered as perhaps the first game to ever feature a visibly ruptured testicle. Wear that honor with pride, Blitz.

Fire Pro Wrestling

For wrestling fans, its obvious when other lovers of sports entertainment worked on a game. You can see a care for detail and history that other titles don’t have, and the Fire Pro Wrestling series has that more than most. Whether on Game Boy Advance or the PS2, the isometric in-ring action is always on point, featuring a highly balanced rock-paper-scissor grappling system. Fire Pro Wrestling’s graphics might not always impress, but it makes up for it by including a deceptively dense roster and close to every wrestling move known to man.

What makes it different? Some wrestling games depend too much on the star power of groups like WWE or WCW, but Fire Pro didn’t bother limiting itself like that. Most entries’ rosters are full of folks who are one step removed from the most famous wrestlers ever. Characters fight like Steve Austin and Ric Flair, but dont look like them – unless you choose the alternate costumes that bear an uncanny resemblance to the headliners signature looks. Who knows how they got away with it at the time, but those creative inclusions make each new entry feel like a wrestling crossover thatd otherwise be impossible.

Mutant League

Whether it’s football or hockey, the Mutant League games still mean a lot to those who grew up with the humorously morbid games. These Genesis/Mega Drive classics have you play as horror show creatures like skeletons, aliens, and trolls on fields that are strewn with corpses by the end of the game. Though only two of this cheekily violent titles were released, Mutant League spawned its own Saturday morning cartoon, which no doubt helped extend the series’ legacy through constant replays in the mid-’90s.

What makes it different? Though EA, the king of official sports, may be the publisher, Mutant League gleefully breaks every rule of sportsmanship. Fighting, bribery, landmines, killing the referee – it’s all legal in Mutant League, making it a great outlet for kids sick of the NFL and NHL rules. Plus, Mutant League has the edge on scary puns. Who wants to play as Bo Jackson and Jerry Rice when you could be Bones Jackson and Scary Ice?

Blood Bowl

Based on a tabletop game of the same name, Blood Bowl repurposes gridiron gameplay for fantasy geeks who may be missing out on the fun. Made by the same folks as Warhammer, Blood Bowl features orcs and goblins engaging in turn-based combat, but the bigger focus is on running a ball from one side of the map to the other, just like in American football. The only difference is this version of the sport has more apothecaries, virtual dice, and parody teams like the Orcland Raiders.

What makes it different? Aside from the NFL lacking in magic and lizardmen (not counting Jerry Jones), Blood Bowl earns its grisly name by being a tad more violent than the mainstream. You can win by scoring the most touchdowns, or you could take the more direct route by killing all 11 players on the opposing team. Much like in XCOM, death sticks in a Blood Bowl match, so you’ve got to be careful when putting an injured player on the field. This next down could be their last.

Saturday Night Slam Masters

Also going by the more intriguing Muscle Bomber: The Body Explosion in Japan, this is an exciting recreation of pro wrestling no matter the title. The game’s characters and attacks are as raucous as anything you’d see in WWE, thanks in part to the colorful designs of manga legend Tetsuo (Fist of the North Star) Hara. His marquee style gets time time in the spotlight, be it the grapplers theatrical entrances, how they stand on the top turnbuckle, or posing for the crowd after a hard fought pinfall.

What makes it different? Back in the early ’90s, WWE was trying its best with arcade games like Royal Rumble, but it could never match titans like Capcom. Street Fighter 2s DNA is definitely within Saturday Night Slam Masters one-on-one brawls, but it adapts to the rules and legacy of wrestling. Instead of throwing fireballs, fighters routinely toss opponents ten feet in the air to catch them in a finishing maneuver, which is pretty rare in real life. The game also has its share of star power thanks to everyone’s favorite politician, Mike Haggar from Final Fight, fitting right in with the rest of the squad.

Super Baseball 2020

NEO GEO rightfully earned its reputation for fighting game excellence, but the arcade/console hybrid has more in its library beyond King of Fighters. Take Super Baseball 2020, one of SNK’s more creative approaches to sports. This sci-fi reinterpretation of America’s favorite pastime turns the diamond into a battle of man versus machine, when teams of robots take on humans for batting supremacy. I think this is how The Matrix begins.

What makes it different? Major League Baseball prefers to take place in the here and now, not the far-off future of upgradable robots (well get there someday). Unlike similar arcade sports games of the era, 2020 has a leveling and experience system similar to the RPG elements now commonplace in MLB games. Speaking of unexpected progressiveness, Super Baseball 2020 is also one of very few baseball titles to feature women playing the game. MLB is going to have to move fast to implement all this in the next five years.

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball

Some baseball titles have light minigames for training your team in pitching, catching, and the like, but most feel like afterthoughts. Rustys Real Deal Baseball has the clever idea of never taking players to a nine inning game, instead focusing all its creativity on how to practice with every piece of baseball equipment there is. And the action gets as varied as carving your own bat from scratch, playing catch with people who have pitching machines for heads, and hitting a series of balls at UFOs.

What makes it different? While Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball may be reminiscent of childhood summers spent playing catch in the park, the game has more in common with WarioWare and Rhythm Heaven. Many of Rusty’s best minigames involve tapping buttons along to the music, ultimately teaching players more about keeping tempo than catching fly balls. Also, no MLB game has as humorous a sad sack as Rusty himself, the over-the-hill baseball great who sells you equipment while telling you all about his most recent misadventures.

Game on

Those are the most out there sports games for now, but are there any others that took organized recreation to the next level? Surely you have your own favorites you want to tell us all about in the comments.

And if you’re looking for more athletics, check out the 13 must-know happenings you missed over WrestleMania weekend and the 11 amazing sports that really need a video game.

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