The best SNES sports games really do compare favorably to modern titles, even besides the nostalgia factor. The Super Nintendo era was a chapter in game industry history well before microtransactions, season passes, Ultimate Team, or soulless annualized sports title releases. Developers were just excited to see what they could make using 16 bits of data.
What they arrived at were some all-timers in gaming history. They may look primitive by modern standards, but their gameplay holds up. Because games lived and died on how they played in this era, developers weren’t trying to build games-as-a-service ecosystems, they really were just trying to make their titles as fun as possible. Well, with the honorable exception of LJN, who seemed to be trying just as tenaciously to achieve the exact opposite. Anyway: the games.
