This is something I always babble in my mind about.
As a kid and even still to this day, don’t think of extreme sports games that much as traditional sports games. The design is too flaccid when compared to other sports games. Not too mention they can lose their context within the genre real quickly.
I think a similar situation can be pointed out with combat sports games, particularly wrestling games. But that’s for another topic, and yes I do also babble quite a lot in my mind about this one.
Then again, I never understood how sports games came to be a genre in the first place, when they are perhaps the most loose and vague out of all gaming genres. Even puzzle games are more straightforward to define by comparison.
Sports games are games which involve using the physical capabilities of the body. This would include many racing games and most fighting games as subsets. And it certainly makes sense to class them together, because someone who’s good at one sport is likely to be good at other sports, too. What’s so hard about that?
As for my comment regarding the comparison of extreme sports and facing games. Mechanics and objectives. Compare Tony Hawk to NBA 2K, big difference. Hell, even target audience plays a huge role.
Compare Tony Hawk to NFS, quite a lot of common ground. You get free roaming levels, time based stunt missions and challenges, identical controls, etc
Many extreme sports have nothing whatsoever to do with racing, and the competition is about how impressive you can make the performance. If you’re jumping out of a helicopter onto a ski slope and ironing a shirt and chugging a Mt Dew in midair, you might not even have an opponent.
That might be true, but that’s not the presentation extreme sports are usually given.
And sure maybe racing games are not the big contender. I would say action-adventure or even role-playing games are the bigger contenders(THUG is literally a skateboarding RPG)
Why do you think all sports games are like racing games? Racing games are nothing like baseball, football, basketball, hockey, or soccer games, each of which has its own devoted fanbase.
