We're pretty cynical about "major league" sports video games at Ars Technica. Mostly, their annual team roster updates rub us the wrong way, and that tradition makes even less sense in an always-online, easily patchable gaming world. But that doesn't mean we hate sports games. Here's the thing: virtual versions of baseball, basketball, or hockey don't always need to be bleedin' authentic.
We'd go so far as to say the most lasting sports video games of our time have reduced their major-league counterparts to simpler abstractions. One of the earliest examples, 1983's One On One, won out by stripping basketball down to its barest bits (perhaps because the Apple II couldn't handle more than two richly animated characters at once). 1988's Tecmo Bowl was a rock-paper-scissors classic, yet it contained so little of American football's defining characteristics that it might have been laughed out of the NES generation had it not contained "real-life" players like Bo Jackson.
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