3) Star Power

Everyone remembers Michael Vick in Madden 2004. The guy was practically unstoppable--as if he was the second coming of Bo Jackson circa the NES Tecmo Bowl days. Never mind the embarrassing fact that he went down with an injury early last season and had no opportunity to live up to the insanely high standards set by his video game double. However, the simple fact is that sometimes developers get player ratings wrong. In Vick's case, the results were pretty glaringly inaccurate. While he's certainly a dynamic player in real life, no player could match the kind of masterful performances a skilled Madden player could guide Vick to in the game.

The simple fact is that the day of the star athlete who's able to dominate a real sport seems to be a fading memory. With Gretzky, Montana, and Jordan long gone, and with Favre declining in skill rapidly, it seems that there are few, if any, players capable of truly dominating a sport for an entire season. Whether it's through simple parity, overexpansion, or a misalignment of the planets, it seems that these days, solid team play bests the LeBron James and Barry Bonds-like players of our time. Sports games, despite the star power depicted on the games' covers, should convey this sense of success through team play rather than simply letting a select few once-in-a-lifetime talents dominate gameplay.

4) Catch-Up AI: A Necessary Evil?

There are 10 minutes left in the third period, and you've got a 3-1 lead. One more goal would surely put your mind at ease, but you're not panicking. After all, you've played a defensive game so far, holding your opponent to fewer than 20 shots on goal for the game and exactly zero here in the third. The game looks to be comfortably in the basket.

Wait a minute... Paul Kariya has a breakaway. Oh no! You've got no one near him, and the guy you're controlling seems to have gone into a seizure on the ice, flailing back and forth violently on the ice instead of cutting off Kariya's path to the goal. Boom! Kariya scores, and now you've got a problem. Two minutes later, the game is tied when one of your computer-controlled teammates was caught out of position for only the second time in the game.

This, friends, is what is called catch-up logic, and it seems to be prevalent in nearly every form of sports game, be it football (especially arcade titles such as NFL Blitz and NFL Street), racing, basketball, or others. In a way, the idea behind catch-up logic is not a bad one. It comes from an honest desire, by the game developer, to keep a game challenging for as long as possible. Sooner or later, you see, a skilled player figures out the ins and outs of a game and can score at will. Enter catch-up logic--that malicious devil that's intent on ruining your skillful play by evening the score through whatever means necessary. Cheap plays, miracle performances, and conspicuous performance degradation of gamer-controlled players are all par for the course. Nothing is taboo to catch-up logic. Its only goal is to beat you down, no matter what the cost.

Many gamers don't have the broadband capability necessary for online play, so they look to the single-player game for their money's worth of entertainment. However, all too often the execution of catch-up logic can be cheap and frustrating. A miracle drive by an opponent's QB can be a thrilling thing to watch, even if you're the one being scored on. However, a certain line is crossed when the game goes from being thrilling to supremely frustrating as your AI opponent's QB picks apart double and triple coverages at will, all while slipping blitzes as if coated with motor oil. It's so heartbreaking to watch the opposing QB transform into Superman over the course of a single possession! In the end, though, there needs to be a balance in the design of game logic that keeps a contest interesting, particularly for the skilled player, while avoiding cheap tactics that feel, in the end, uncomfortably close to cheating.

5) Give the D Some Love

Talk of nasty catch-up tricks brings up another important point. Why has defense gotten such short shrift in sports games? After all, there are two aims in playing sports games: scoring and preventing the other team from doing the same. Scoring is certainly the sexier of the two aims. Who doesn't enjoy pulling off a perfectly timed alley-oop or scoring a shorthanded goal with no time left on the clock? There's a lot of satisfaction to be gained from good play on the other side of the ball, however. Yet many sports games seem to put defense on the back burner.

In football, for example, controlling a defensive back--especially a cornerback--can be an exercise in frustration. Camera angles play a big part in this, because the default camera is rightly centered on the play in the middle of the field, where the quarterback and running backs line up. However, this means that for wide receivers who are running specific out patterns, your controlled player may end up covering a WR who is completely offscreen. A possible solution might be a zoomable camera that is controlled by the user (attached, perhaps, to a shoulder button) and that allows the user to zoom the camera to the player he was controlling at any given moment, thus allowing for tighter, user-controlled coverage on a receiver. Of course, the trade-off here is a limited ability to see the actual play as it unfolds. Additionally, this zoom feature would be rendered useless during running plays.

With features such as the "hit stick," games like Madden 2005 have made some inroads on the defensive side of the ball. Still, it would be great to reward the player with just as many options on defense as there already are on offense.

6) Cheese-Free Zone

You've played the guy online... You know the type. He's got one trick shot that bounces off the goalie's back and into the net seven out of 10 times, and he uses it every chance he gets. You know the guy who finds a cheap warp bug in a racing game, which earns him a few extra seconds per lap over you, and then rubs it in your face when you finally straggle to the checkered flag. You know the guy who goes for it every fourth down, no matter how far back you've pinned him in his own territory, and calls deep passes every play. You know the cheeser. You hate the cheeser.

If there's one negative, ancillary effect to be found in the rise of online gaming over the past two or three years, it's the prevalence of questionable tactics in sports games, typically known by the colloquial name "cheese." Not exactly cheating, though the two often cross-mingle, cheesing implies strategic choices that are either entirely unbalanced (such as passing on every down) or outright malicious (like pausing a game and forcing the opposing player to watch the same replay over and over again with the intent of causing him or her to quit the game, take the loss, and take the subsequent ratings hit).

On one hand, you can't blame the cheeser. Incapable of winning by skill, wit, or a combination of the two, the cheeser instead exploits a particular feature of a money play and drives it (and you) into the ground. On the other hand, the sheer prevalence of cheesers found online means it can be darn near impossible to find a good contest against a perfect stranger. As it stands now, the best defense against cheese is simply refusing to play anyone you don't know.

Game developers have taken steps toward cutting down on cheap tactics by implementing the penalization of players for dropping games (or, possibly more effectively, showing the number of drops a player has initiated on his or her profile screen), limiting the number and duration of gameplay pauses, and relying on player feedback. Still, there's a long way to go. Sure, everyone wants to win when they go online. The goal, however, should be to win fairly and squarely. As Confucius might have said, had he been alive to play ESPN NHL 2K5, "A victory via cheese is a failure of spirit."