The PlayStation 3 has such a fascinating library of games that are no longer relevant and that nobody talks about. But if you ask me, it's the games built around the PlayStation Move that fascinate me the most. In the pantheon of motion-controlled gaming, you have this giant, Nintendo. Their new console is just like their old console, but now it's got bowling. And the bowling is pretty fun! Soon enough, you start seeing the thing pop up in your friend's houses, at your aunt's, and eventually, at the nursing home your grandma is staying at temporarily. It's free real estate; if you can mine that gold, you can live off of it forever. In comes Microsoft with their ambitious Project Natal, so ahead of its time that the fucking thing is advertised with a chatbot program by notorious conman Peter Molyneux. You can see the shoe of your Avatar; thank you, Bill Gates, very cool. And then you have Sony, which is in the corner of the room, picking its nose. They have this camera accessory called the PlayStation Eye, which doesn't have much use outside of letting children make low-grade home movies with an application that makes them think they're filmmakers for standing in front of a camera. How do you compete with someone who's rolling the dough and another person who's going to open shop next door? Take your old failures, repackage them, and promote them as something new. So in comes the PlayStation Move, with its admittedly stress ball-esq colored tip and bizarre two-handed control scheme for anyone unlucky enough to not buy the required accessory. The Kinect has Kinect Sports; it has Dance Central. What do we have in store? Uh, shit. Start the Party and Eyepet? What about TV Superstar? Who wants to be a TV Superstar? Good god, put that thing down before it tears through the TV. Okay, okay. Kung Fu Rider, anyone? No, now I've broken my wrist.

I say that the PlayStation Move library intrigues not out of admiration for it but curiosity. The Wii had Wii Sports, and the Kinect had a really polished dance game to make you forget that you weren't getting your money's worth out of Sonic Free Riders. But the PlayStation Move? Fuck it, anything goes. No joke, my father bought a bundle that they called something like the Move Party Pack, and it was a couple of Moves packaged with a copy of EyePet and Start the Party. Start the Party, I kind of understand; I mean, it's not great, but it has Party in the name. But EyePet? Who the fuck is going to birthday parties wanting to play EyePet? And they have a lot more of these that I'm probably not remembering.

But Sports Champions? I remember Sports Champions. The one game that didn't come as part of the supposed party pack was actually the one and only Move game we held a party with. It was for my older brother, and they did nothing but the sword fighting game. They went one-on-one with it, had this kind of invisible bracket going on. True to the title of a game, it felt like I was watching a sport play out in front of me.

I think what differentiates the sword fighting in Sports Champions from something like Wii Sports Resort is that the latter only really appeals to you for a few rounds before you eventually say, "fuck it, let's go back to bowling." It's not so much a game of strategy and attrition as much as it is, "how much can I get out of using my Wiimote as a fidget toy?" Sports Champions has that, but there's a layer of depth to it that so often goes over my head whenever I recall my experiences with it. Even now, I can barely remember the finer details. But I do remember that that party went on for hours, which is more than our sessions of Wii Sports lasted us.

As for the other games in this package that aren't the obviously good one, they're... fine? I can't say I remember much about them, either. But I do remember having fun with them, too. I think Disc Golf and Archery stand out to me the most because what self-respecting sports game puts Disc Golf and Archery into their collection? But here's the funny thing: it works. They're not one-to-one recreations of the sports themselves, but do you honestly think Gladiators had the ability of a pain-sensitive Wolverine with a bullet-proof vest on?

I think, all around, this is a pretty solid package. My memories could be lying to me, which is why I haven't given it a rating. I think what really sucks is that it's a game I'll never go back to. We technically still own it, our PlayStation Eye, and all of the Move controllers we owned back then. But the PlayStation Eye has become a permanent fixture of our family computer, our Move controllers have gotten old and weary, and our PlayStation 3 barely even connects to our TV anymore--not like anyone's using it that much, anyway. I believe the reason gimmick controls like motion accessories, Rock Band and Guitar Hero have faded into memory is because, past being set up, you have to keep them somewhere. And as the years go on, you decide to play different games. If you were on a desert island with Sports Champions, you'd probably play it until the controllers started leaking battery acid. But like the entitled children we are, we don't hang on. We see something new, we get excited, and what was once boundary-pushing to our eleven-year-old minds is now collecting dust in the room with everything else you've been neglecting for years. There's a part of me that weeps, knowing what my eagerness to explore the furthest reaches of this medium has done to the things I once loved as a child. At one point, I was content with playing Rage Against the Machine's Testify on Bass as my father played it next to me on Guitar, but the old Rock Band microphone I used to record the audio for videos nobody has ever seen or would care to has had its cord torn to shreds. There's an old copy of Rock Band 4 that none of us have played because the process of migrating all of the music to it was too convoluted. Now I listen to Testify on my Spotify Premium account. It doesn't register with me that this once meant something; in that hollow moment, I bask in the momentary joy of the sound. I practice notes on my air guitar as I do so. The fact that I could never hit the blue or the orange buttons still stays with me, but for this moment, I am ten again. I am twenty-one, eleven years older than I was when I recoiled with every virtual hit my brother's friends landed on him.

Rest in Peace, Sports Champions. You were the best of the bad library we had, and I will probably never play you again.