It’s no surprise that nostalgia has dominated all corners of media over the last decade or two. As creators of all stripes are having a harder and harder time trying to come up with original and exciting ideas that will captivate the masses and make an impact in an increasingly competitive attention economy, and as consumers are becoming more cynical and pessimistic about the future as well as the present, we have seen more attempts by both groups to travel back to the past. Whether it’s movie studios releasing remakes and sequels of classic action movies such as Jurassic Park, The Running Man, or Mission: Impossible all this year, or consumers going back and re-reading classic novels or re-binging shows like The Office, Friends, or Game of Thrones, nostalgia is becoming the driving force behind most people’s media diets.
While this is definitely a trend in media consumption, it’s not without its faults and problems. For instance, none of the three movie examples I listed got amazing reviews (although they’d definitely be described as “mixed” rather than bad), and going back and binging episodes of shows like Friends and The Office can reveal a bland flavor and a hollow feeling in what were once beloved sitcoms. While these shows and movies still have massive fan bases, upon revisiting them with a more critical eye, even die-hard fans can see that their fondness for the media is more about nostalgia than the actual content of the show or movie.
It would be easy for us, as fans of sports video games, to look at this nostalgia phenomenon and see it as affecting only more traditional media like ’90s or 2000s sitcoms or ’80s action movies, but let’s be honest, nostalgia can be a massive blind spot for us as well. There are several games that, for one reason or another, are given a lot of credit and credence, yet are not actually that great when looked at critically now that we are older and wiser.
Wii Sports
Released in 2006, Wii Sports definitely came out during a formative time in many young Zillennial sports fans’ lives. As somebody who played a lot of sports growing up but much preferred staying on the sofa playing video games and watching TV, Wii Sports was the ultimate compromise between my parents and me and my siblings.
I remember it as infinitely better than it actually was, as I spent hours competing against my siblings, cousins, and friends. The baseball game was obviously a favorite in my house as it was by far the most popularly played and watched sport of the five games offered in the original game (baseball, tennis, bowling, golf, and boxing). But the baseball aspect, much like the rest of the game, was incredibly shallow with very little strategy or nuance, which, to be fair, wasn’t ever the point of the game. Nintendo never intended for Wii Sports to be an in-depth experience of skill and strategy, with hours worth of different game modes and variance.
The problem that I have with it, and why it made this list, is that with nearly 83 million copies sold, Wii Sports is the highest-grossing sports game ever, and the third most sold video game ever! For a 20-year-old game with as much depth as Pac-Man or Tetris, that just seems wrong. With all the great sports games that have been made like Tecmo Bowl, NBA Jam, NBA Street volume 2, and ESPN NFL 2K5, for Wii Sports to crush all of those with seemingly no thought put into the gameplay mechanics or game depth it just makes me a little angry and that’s why this game, which was clearly thought highly of (otherwise it wouldn’t have sold so many damn copies) is in the slot of games that aren’t as good upon further review.
2014 NCAA Football
As the last iteration of NCAA Football and the only college football game that we had for an entire decade, it makes sense why this game is so beloved and why so many people (myself included) have put insane amounts of hours into this game. Let’s be real with ourselves though, this game wasn’t that great, yes it was entertaining for the time, and was probably better than Madden 25 (which came out in 2013 and is separate from the 2024 title with the same name, which was one of the dumbest naming decisions in the history of marketing but I digress) but there is really no reason the game should be put up on a pedestal especially now with two successful releases of the CFB franchise as its natural successor.
You can argue that there are elements of NCAA 14 that did things better than CFB does, but those things are few and far between, and CFB 26 easily makes up for those lapses with current era graphics and real-life rosters.
NCAA 14 isn’t even the best game in that series; NCAA 12 holds that title, as it had the better dynasty mode mechanics and a more in-depth recruiting system, as well as having more fluid gameplay. I didn’t play nearly as much NCAA 12 as I did NCAA 14, because I had gotten rid of NCAA 12 by the time the series stopped, and I (along with a lot of other players) just kept playing 14 because it was the only college football game we had.
Madden 10-20
This one is personal to me, as I have probably played thousands of hours in these games, and there was a time when I thought these games, particularly Madden 13, 25, and 15 (again, horrendous naming, and I’ll never truly get over it), were the only games worth playing! Now, a big part of that was my obsession with football, and the NFL in particular. I was willing to overlook a bad gaming experience (one that got continually worse each year until just a few years ago). I loved my time playing these games, even on the PS Vita which for a while was my go-to console of choice (sidenote: the Vita gets a bad rap, it was honestly a decent handheld for the time that had a pretty good library of mid to early 2010s PlayStation titles) but looking back, I honestly can’t believe I tolerated such mediocre games.
In my opinion, Madden hit its peak in the mid to late 2000s and starting in 2010, started to shed features, gameplay mechanics, and game modes in exchange for a focus on graphics that, while improved nominally, didn’t improve beyond what was already being achieved across the gaming industry as consoles got more powerful, graphics cards exponentially grew in strength. Madden also lost its competitive edge after 2013, when it no longer had to compete with the NCAA or any other football franchise, and coasted on its NFL license and market dominance, continuing to put out subpar products throughout the decade.
It wasn’t until 2020 that I broke off my toxic relationship with the game and stopped buying it annually. The last year or two, however, I stepped back into the game and have been pleasantly surprised with the game’s increased quality. Perhaps the resurgence of an EA college football game has finally lit a fire under Madden’s creative team, or maybe this is just a blip in Madden’s prolonged fall from grace.
