I promise to keep this blog about video games, but I think I should touch on my other main passion in life, sports. I wanted to talk about this in order to explain why I don’t always have time for gaming and blogging. Afterwords you might be wondering how I have time for anything else in my life, especially gaming. You might understand a little more if I preface this by telling you I don’t watch any TV shows or Movies that are not related to sports. I used to as a kid, but as time went on I felt shows and movies were declining in quality at the same time as my interest in sports was rising. I will watch documentaries (sports, history, culture) from time to time as a means to learn more then entertain. I enjoy watching just about all sports, with the exemption of racing of any kind. This hasn’t always been the case, and my favorite sport has changed along with the times. Thankfully the world of sports has always been, and will, be an integral part of the gaming world. As my taste in sports has changed, so to has my video gaming habits. I figured it would be easiest to give a brief history to show how I got to where I am now.

I’ve already touched on how most of my earliest memories have to do with video games. Well sports take up the other parts of my early memories. I’ve been told I’ve been watching sports with my dad since before my memories even exist, going back to before I was even one years old. I was born in Colorado, but my parents were from Michigan and my dad graduated from Michigan State University. I have been watching MSU football and basketball as long as I can remember. Nearly 29 years later I make it a point to watch as many MSU games with my dad as possible. Another thing I inherited was a love for Detroit teams in all sports, something that was made easier when we moved back to Michigan when I was two. This is the foundation of my love of sports, and I will always be the biggest fan of the teams I inherited from my father. This type of fandom inheritance is truly what makes sports special. Even had I stayed and grew up in Colorado, I’m sure there would always have been a soft spot in my heart for my father’s teams. Something that I would’ve past down as well.

As I got older my dad became busier with work and had to limit himself to watching Football and MSU basketball. This lead me to venture into the unknown by myself in learning all of the other sports. As I became a kid there was three ways to teach me all of these wonderful sports. The first, of course, was watching them on TV. Announcers try to do a good job of explaining the rules of the game during every telecast. Just by watching the athletes and listening to the announcers I had a good base of knowledge for the four main sports shown in America at the time; Football, Baseball, Basketball and Hockey. The second way of learning was to actually go out and play the sport, ether with friends at the park or in an organized league with the help of your parents. I had played a little of everything ether at school recess and gym or at the park across the street from where I grew up. The first sport I got into a league was baseball. I would go on to play baseball for twelve straight years, even making the Varsity squad at my High School. I had a great knowledge of all the sports, but I wasn’t as athletically gifted as I would’ve liked to be. My parents actually met each other doing musical theatre as teenagers. They gave me a great musical and creative gene, but that athletic gene was missing for the most part. I tried, but couldn't hang in the running and athleticism required to play sports such as basketball, football and soccer. I had skill in each, but it was just too much to handle. Thankfully the third way to learn and enjoy sports came to me in the form of video games.

I’m pretty sure punch-out would’ve been the first sports game I’ve ever played, and to this day it would probably be in my top 25 sports games of all time. As a real young lad I got into baseball the most, so a lot of my NES experience was with games such as R.B.I. baseball. While they might not make you run faster or hit harder, video games are a perfect tool to teach the ins and outs of each sport. As in any video game, there’s a certain trail and error in learning how the rules of that game work. This is no different in sports games, except that this time you can take what you learned and apply it to real life. These little things learned go a long way in making you a better player in the real life sport but also makes watching and following the big leagues that much more enjoyable.

Once I got to the SNES, one of the first games I owned was NHLPA ’93. Kind of a weird name for a game, but this was a huge step in learning more about sports. This game had no NHL license to use the real teams, such as the Detroit Red Wings, giving me a red colored team called Detroit. Actually at that age, it didn’t even occur to me that it wasn’t the Red Wings. The NHLPA title comes from the fact that the game did have a license to use all of the real life players names, giving you the real line-ups from the 92-93 NHL season. I now have a great base of knowledge for each sport, but here’s a fun to play video game that teaches me all about the players. Who everyone is, what they do and how good they are. Soon after, most every sports game I would buy would include real teams and players, and as graphics improved actually had players likenesses.

I could always remember a basketball game I played in the arcades that was unlike any other game I’ve played before. It took the game of basketball but changed the rules so that there were no such thing as fouls no matter what you did. This was a whole lot of fun to take something I knew and throw a huge twist on it. I could never find that arcade game, but a few years latter I would pick up NBA Jam for the SNES. I could tell this wasn’t the game I had played before, this was so much cooler and actually had real NBA teams and players. I would find out years later the long lost arcade game was made by the same people who would go on to make NBA Jam. That game was called Arch-Rivals and within the last few months I picked up a copy for the NES.

So at this point, I’ve played both simulation and arcade types of sports games. At least I thought I had played simulation, as my mind was truly about to find out how close you could make a game to real life. I can remember having the very first Madden NFL game back before it had a number after it, named John Madden’s Football. While it was no Tecmo Bowl, it was a fun game that set the stage for bigger and better. Somewhere around Madden ’96 for the SNES it started adding more and more to the game. It had a season mode with real life schedules, that lead to playoffs and the Super Bowl. It also introduced a create-a-player, where for the first time you could put yourself in the game. There would be a few mini games to complete, such as things you would do at the NFL Combine, giving your created player attributes biased on your performances. This would combine two of my favorite video game genres, Sports and RPG.

My Madden love would fall off in the coming years but was replaced by it’s little step-brother, NCAA Football. As much as I love professional football, college football is the best. There’s so much history, passion, local pride and pageantry. From the bands to the fans, everything just seems a little more personal and less corporate (well no so much anymore…moving on). These college football games would have dynasty modes taking the old formula of playing one full season over and over, into the new age of multiple seasons, one after another in the same mode. This would add all sorts of amazing intricacies such as recruiting new players each season. This type of mode would change your gaming, as you now act as the players, the coach, management and the team owners. This gives you insight into just about every aspect of each sport.

Through the teen years into adulthood in becomes harder and harder to play or organize a game with your buddies. The world of online gaming brings back these childhood memories of playing sports with your friends. The game that I have played the most as a teammate with my friends has been the Fifa franchise. As I grew up, I wanted to know as much as I could about every sport. I’ll watch the grand slams of Tennis and Golf. Even Olympic sports get the spotlight every four years, leaving me able to name off the all time greats in figure skating, swimming, gymnastics and all kinds of random sports. My love for the Olympics was especially strong because of my love of history and countries. Another sport that always intrigued me because of it’s worldwide appeal was Soccer. Unfortunately, there was never really anywhere in America to get soccer on TV. I would watch the world cup, but something that big couldn’t be understood watching a few games every four years. In about 2002, Fox Soccer Chanel was made available and I was able to watch English soccer for the first time. In a time where I had already “conquered” mostly every sport, here was one that had a huge following that I knew hardly anything about. There was an appeal to learn but there was also a huge opportunity to choose my own team for the first time ever. Here I had hundreds of teams from multiple leagues where I had no family inheritance, no regional preference or rivalries. It was a completely clean slate that I didn’t even know I had wanted. Somewhere around that time is when I first played Fifa, and was forced to pick an English team to root for, so that I can pick them in Fifa. After doing some research I went with Bolton Wanderers. I love a good underdog, and Bolton has had the most years in the top division that has never won the title. In a way it reminds me of my Detroit Lions. I figured if I become a fan now and they ever do win that title, I’ll be just as happy as the fans living in Bolton. Through the next ten years or so, I tried to learn as much as I could, and as it turns out, I would need that knowledge. On Xbox 360, Fifa would show me how cool online gaming could be. I got together with some other soccer fans who I worked with, and we all formed a team online where we each control our created player, battling other teams online. This keeps the RPG elements of leveling up, and gives you that feeling of being on a sports team like when you were a kid. I’ll do a whole blog on Fifa at some point. As of right now, it is the game I play the most, trying to at least get a few long sessions in, every other week.

I haven’t even touched on how I feel professional wrestling is a sport, and probably has been my favorite for 20 years now. I can do another blog about that some other day, but I spend 20 or so hours a week watching different wrestling companies. Just to give an extreme example of the amount of sports I watch, I’ll give a little run down of what I watched in the last week. I’m pretty much always watching multiple things at once, up to three at a time with the help of two TV’s and a MacBook. The NCAA college basketball tournament started this weekend. In the four days it’s been on I have watched parts of every game, 48 in total. While watching basketball a busy weekend of soccer was going on, from leagues all around the world. I watched multiple games from England, Spain, France, Italy, Russia and the USA. I would say somewhere around 40 in total, all week long. After that long weekend of watching a hundred games, I needed to catch up on any wrestling I may have missed, about 8 hours total. These may all seem insane, and I’m not going to argue, but it is truly what I am passionate about. Someday I may create a sports blog as well, but for now I will be focusing on this video game blog. I am currently playing both games that I’ve wrote first impressions about (Persona and Crisis Core) as well as Fifa with my friends when they’re on. Since the RPG's take longer to play through I will be continuing to try to play a few NES games or anything I can play through in a single day, so that I can blog about it. Sometimes I think I put my brain on overload with the amount of knowledge I seek, but even if half of it goes out the other ear, I should be retaining most of it. Thank you for reading and game on!