OS Weekly Wrap Up, Getting You Caught Up on Sports Gaming News (Jan. 26 - Feb. 1, 2020)

No other arcade games received more quarters from me than WWF Superstars and WWF WrestleFest. My earliest memories of entertainment consumption include heavy doses of wrestling. I was in awe of the characters on my television screen at home, which translated to a similar fascination at arcades across Detroit. The pageantry of pro wrestling combined with the glitz and glamour of an arcade created a powerful concoction that demanded a full plastic bucket of quarters at all times. It certainly didn’t hurt that the overly-cartoonish artwork style was absolutely pitch perfect for the game and the era in which it existed.

The EA NHL development team has taken shots over the last several years when it comes to its player ratings. In the NHL series, there is rarely enough player separation between top line players and third and fourth line players. On the whole, the lack of differentiation is less than ideal and probably has something to do with the number of leagues included in the game.

With that in mind, is the EA team way off as it relates to the attributes of the players on the NHL All-Star teams, or does the team get it more right than wrong? To test this out, we’ll take a look and see how the results from this past weekends NHL’s All-Star Skills Competition compare with the attribute ratings in EA’s NHL 20.

There is a fresh topic on the forums that just started Sunday night. It relates to MLB The Show 20 co-op or online team play being included in the game as a way to excite more people to play the series. It’s an interesting topic to me because forum user DCowboys22 puts together his rationale for why he wants it, and possible ways he would put it together.

My interest is also piqued because we know we’re getting online leagues back in some form, so it’s a perfect time to think about unique ways we could run online leagues.

For as popular as NBA 2K20 is on OS, it can be somewhat hard to find consistent NBA 2K20 sliders that people rally around. In comparison to 2K, we have smaller communities with a much wider array of slider sets and slider makers.

NBA 2K is tricky for a couple reasons. For one, our audience is more diverse in 2K so it’s not as structured around franchise mode as it is with some other games. On top of that, NBA 2K changes its game a lot with patches, and this makes it hard to create consistent sliders.

I will be the first to admit that rugby isn’t my strong suit. Going into this, I thought it would be nearly impossible to learn the ins and outs of the sport, but I was able to pick up the basics pretty quickly. Unfortunately, this also means I don’t have any other rugby games to compare this one to, so Rugby 20 serves as my introduction to the sport. On some level, I consider this a good thing because I have no biases or preconceived notions about the game, whether they be positive or negative.

As for the gameplay, you only have to worry about controlling the offense, which believe it or not, is excellent. Sure, you’d probably like to have a bit more control on defense when a team is driving late in a critical game with playoff implications, but that’s okay. When you’re on defense, the game will simulate each play and update you with the latest happenings. Once you have the ball on offense, this is where the game truly shines.

I’m not sure there is a motorcycle game that has been made that I have enjoyed as much as MESC 3. Whether you’re a supercross fan or not, this is one title that deserves to be in your rotation. Monster Energy Supercross 3 is a beautiful blend of arcade and sim that’s full of addictive and frustrating fun that will have you consistently wanting to tackle just one more race.

Way back in early September, before the kickoff of any 2019 NFL games, I made ten predictions for the upcoming season based on a Madden 20 franchise simulation. Sure, it might have seemed like a silly and unscientific way to project how the season would play out, but it wasn’t really all that different from everyone else out there throwing out ideas about how they expected teams and players to fare. And unlike most prognosticators, I thought it might be interesting to look back on how accurate Madden was in anticipating the way things played out.

Much like snowflakes, no two football games are exactly alike. Even with the same two teams playing against each other, the outcome is almost certain to be significantly different from one game to the next. Since the Super Bowl LIV matchup between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs will be one game to decide it all, it’s difficult to tell what could happen when these two teams meet. But it would at least be easier to determine the most likely result of the Super Bowl if we had a larger sample size of these two teams squaring off against each other, especially considering these teams did not meet once in the regular season.