Six of the best obscure sports in gaming
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Version 0 of 1. UNIRALLYUNICYCLING Released late in 1994 in the US as Uniracers, before rolling twitchily on to European shelves several months later as Unirally, this 2D unicyling racer from DMA design is a sporting gem that could have been huge. Unfortunately for DMA, Pixar felt Unirally’s protagonist one-wheelers were a little too similar to the star of its 1987 short Red’s Dream. A lawsuit ensued and DMA lost. As a result, Nintendo apparently halted production of Unirally cartridges, meaning only 300,000 made the shops. And so it was that the brilliant, strange little racer was doomed to be a cult classic, when it could have thrived in the mainstream. The SNES game is certainly simple and shallow, but it is tremendous fun; especially in eight-player league mode. WORLD GAMES GERMAN BARREL JUMPING Developer Epyx had enjoyed considerable success with its Summer Games and Winter Games releases in 1984. Both collected together conventional sports commonly seen in the summer and Winter Olympics – albeit without officially standing as Olympics titles – and attracted enough sales for the developer to want more from the series. Which led to World Games in 1986, which compiled an unlikely collection of national pastime sports, including Scottish caber toss, Canadian log rolling and the time-honoured, slightly mysterious German tradition of barrel jumping. The challenges included make World Games the undisputed champion of obscure sports video games and ultimately inspired a sequel with a little more mainstream appeal. That follow-up was the beloved California Games, featuring a sublime musical score often fused wonderfully with the gameplay and plenty of jumping, even if it wasn’t over German barrels. TIGER WOODS PGA TOUR 10DISC GOLF Disc golf has enjoyed burgeoning popularity in some parts of the world, particularly the US. Here in the UK, however, while there are a scattering of commercial courses, the sport remains in its infancy. Based around the rules of conventional golf, but played with Frisbee-like plastic discus, disc golf is sometimes pitched as ‘hippy golf’. It’s considered by many to stand as a diametric cultural opposite to the elitist values associated with the traditional game. And yet golf’s biggest star at the time, Tiger Woods, made disc golf available as a playable mode in his 2010 game, exposing the sport to many outside the United States. MORPHEUS STREET LUGE STREET LUGE Ask people to name a VR headset and most are likely to pick Oculus Rift. But the Rift isn’t the only in-development headset. Sony’s own Project Morpheus has been meeting a lot of gamers at events across the globe and the sport of street luge – or hurtling down a steep road on a skateboard-like contraption – is being used to demonstrate the hardware’s potential. The sport and the VR experience are a fine complement for one another: lying on a PlayStation-branded beanbag at an expo, chin on chest, allows for a simple union of real world and in-game posture, with none of the visual and physical disconnects often apparent when strolling through a virtual world. With your perspective scraping the tarmac, leaning the body to turn, it’s a remarkably intense, immediate experience. And for anybody who eschewed standing on a skateboard as a child, opting instead to lie on the board, it’s nostalgic. HUSKY EXPRESSDOG-SLED RACING Dog sled racing still isn’t a Winter Olympics sport, despite a brief appearance at the games in 1932 when two teams in total competed for gold and silver as a “demonstration”. It has, however, turned up in a far less likely place: it became the subject of a Korean multiplayer online game by Korean developer DevCat. Released in 2009 – and closed by 2011 – Husky Express mixed racing and adventure elements and at least serves to demonstrate the size of the MMO genre in Korea. It is a crowded space indeed that inspires studios to pick such unlikely subject matter in the battle for finding a new USP. BILL LAIMBEER’S COMBAT BASKETBALLCOMBAT BASKETBALL All right. You’ve got us. Combat basketball isn’t a real sport. But Bill Laimbeer was a real player – a long-standing Detroit Pistons team member famed for his aggressive style of play in the 80s and 90s. And his absurd spin on the hoop-shooting video game came years before Shaquille O’Neal lent his name to Shaq Fu, or Michael Jordan starred in the peculiar basketball-themed platform game Chaos in the Windy City. Many who know of it will tell you Combat Basketball is an awful game and fans of the Pistons’ rival teams may balk at a game celebrating Laimbeer’s knack for hard fouls. But Laimbeer was arguably a trendsetter who showed his contemporaries that you didn’t have to limit your vision of basketball to the rules, on or off the court. |