With how Saturday morning cartoon blocks have effectively stopped existing on regular TV channels, and later sports did for at least a while, this at least means that cartoons aren’t getting preempted so much by sports. The weird thing is when it’s not even the actual sports part, but rather a recap of sports that just has to precede the actual sports part. It’s so utterly important that a show about what happened in baseball in the past week shows right before a baseball game, so since sometimes the later cartoons would be the best ones to watch, those end up getting all left behind or delayed indefinitely, or to the point where certain episodes don’t even air in some areas because so much baseball happened.
I never understand sports that much, mainly that people have to score points by doing athletic stuff, and sometimes by doing drugs which is supposed to be a bad thing but they might not look into it until much later. Maybe part of my contempt for sports just stems from my childhood of canceled cartoons and whatnot. However there was the one time a space shuttle exploded that preempted everything, where I have nothing against space shuttles, but everything against tragedy. So it’s not the preempting thing I guess, it’s what does it. And a sport where a lot of the time is standing around or sitting around doesn’t appeal to me. Neither do tragic accidents, of course.
Baseball is one thing, but “stock” car racing (where cars are hardly even stock because they remove most things and put in a super engine) is another. Casual fans just want to see crashes, but have to be sad for if someone actually dies in a crash, and then go back to wanting to see crashes after a while. I’d rather just crash the cars as much as possible in a video game because at least the cars might explode spectacularly there with nobody getting hurt. Hardcore fans, like many other sports, I don’t think I can comprehend. The tracks are generally ovals. Even Daytona USA had some variance in tracks. There is a type of auto racing that takes place in closed off city roads and such, legally. That seems to be the big focus of racing games, other than making the cars as shiny as possible. I don’t see many come up for a regular oval track race, but that may also because there’s no interest outside of being a simulation that gets an official NASCAR license to do so. Also why it’s hard to find football games that don’t star real teams, unless they really put the “fantasy” into football such as Blood Bowl.
In football, that is the US style of football, but also soccer (or “everywhere else” football), more seems to be going on at least. Even if not-US football has lower scores typically. I still tend to not watch games, and it’s more purely luck if I just happen to tune in to the halftime show, but I can still see the appeal of a quality arcade-ish football game, that is the ones that pretty much ended by the middle of the PS2 era, from at least what I can look up. Since they didn’t perfect eyelash and sweat rendering at the time, they had to make sure the games at least held up instead of just looking hyper-realistic. Depending on the game, you can even have people on fire, run over players with an ambulance that’s already picking up an injured player, or do mirror matches. If there’s custom players, that can get even weirder.
However, sports games in general aren’t exactly my top pick, especially in the modern scope, where it is the most realistic thing they can figure out, to the point where they’d simulate the biggest games in the games, but I’d decided to simulate them in older games with outdated rosters and possibly mechanics and such. Just to see how close I’d get. There’s the occasional game that throws in some weird mechanics for the sake of fun over realism, but not so much. In car racing games, I might just end up getting bored and start trying to ram into the other cars going the other way. Unless it has something to do about drifting, then bring the Eurobeat.