On December 23, 2022 I wrote the following: "The day has finally come. Let's not kid ourselves. This was always going to be my GOTY 2022."

I then added: "EDIT: Had a great time with it so far, but uhhhh definitely gonna pause and wait for a patch. This cake is tasty, but it's not exactly done in the middle."

It's now July, and Sports Story has been looming over my head ever since it shadow-dropped back in December. It had been one of my most-anticipated titles ever since it was announced, but the state it launched in was pretty bleak. I told myself that I’d wait for updates and then I’d play the game once it was finished, but the devs put out 5 updates pretty quickly, and we’ve had nothing but radio silence since February 24th.

Sadly, I think this is as “finished” as we’re gonna get.

Over the past week I committed to finishing the follow-up to one of my favorite games of all time, no matter how disappointing things got. And they got pretty disappointing!

Now, a lack of polish and an abundance of bugs aren’t the only things that set Sports Story apart from its immaculate predecessor. Everything the previous game did has been reimagined, but unfortunately it’s a downgrade in every regard. The golfing mechanics were great in Golf Story, but features like curving the ball, adding spin, and altering the height of your shot arc have been completely removed. Your control over the ball has been neutered while courses have become more complicated and unpredictable. The caverns golf course is the low point, where it’s unclear which obstacles will trigger hit detection and which ones are floating above the field of play. It’s baffling that the devs felt the need to re-invent their golf controls instead of just keeping them as they were. The one interesting thing they’ve done is include different types of balls with effects like bouncing towards the pin, being unaffected by wind, or bouncing on water. I enjoyed each of these and used them when I could, but each special ball is a rare consumable item, so once you’ve used them, they’re all gone (until the final area where you can purchase them, but they’re quite pricey). The number of obtainable golf clubs is also sparse, which was such a highlight in the previous game. The concept of meaningful upgrades seems to have been an afterthought here, and that doesn’t just apply to the golf, your equipment is extremely limited for EVERY sport.

Now we’ve got to address the other titular sports contained in the game. It’s abundantly clear that the devs spread themselves too thin by trying to create compelling mechanics for too many sports. Or rather, I should probably say the “dev”, because contrary to the ragebait articles which did the rounds earlier this year, there seems to be a total of one programmer at Sidebar Games. I’m sure you’re aware of the secret dev room easter egg, where a team complains of being overworked while poor management constantly changes plans. Since the game was in such a bad state, players assumed that this was left in the game by actual miserable employees, but from everything I can find online (as well as the game’s credits), this game was made by one programmer, one composer, one lead artist, and a team of 5 additional artists. That’s it! So it’s important to realize that the narrative spun up by a handful of articles which told a tale of a large team being abused by inept leadership is nothing more than fantasy. In truth, this game is a sad tale of a single dev spreading themself too thin. Where they were able to master Golf Story’s mechanics in 2017 (there are definitely some BIG OPINIONS about Disc Golf out there, but I felt it was intuitive and I quite enjoyed it), the task of handling golf, tennis, cricket, soccer, baseball, BMX, fishing, running, volleyball, and a little bit of RC racing proved to be too daunting. I’ll address each of them briefly.

Golf: Downgrade in every way, as previously stated. Omnipresent frame stutters often occur while lining up a shot, so there were a few times where I completely missed a shot simply because the game froze for a second while I was swinging.

Tennis: This is the one that the most time is spent on (other than golf, of course). I managed to get the hang of it by the end of the tennis storyline, but it’s largely unresponsive. The ball would frequently clip right through my character while I was swinging, yet sometimes I would hit a ball that had already passed me. You’re unable to aim your shots for the most part, only hitting a ball with a maximum angle of about 10 degrees to either side. When you’re trying to whack a ball past an opponent, it would have been nice to do something other than hit it straight forward. Scoring is also glitched, because if a ball is hit out of bounds, but bounces off the back wall of the arena and ends up hitting the net on their opponent’s side of the court, the person who hit the ball OOB will still get the point. It just feels bad to play.

Cricket: I still don’t understand cricket! An entire match is never played, you'll bat and you’ll block, but that’s it. Like tennis, the hit detection is rough, with balls sometimes passing through the cricket bat unfazed.

Soccer: This one’s bad. There will be small challenges where you freely run around and kick something into a makeshift goal, and those handle just fine. But most of Sports Story's soccer activity is set up like penalty kicks, which are aimed and kicked with golf mechanics, often with a LOT of wind. They feel really bad and are the only challenges I ended up skipping.

Baseball: Funnily enough, the in-game sports corporation PureStrike apparently hates baseball, so owning a bat is illegal. There are batting cages (and a tiny bit of cheeky lawless outdoor baseball) in the game, but just like tennis and cricket, swinging and hitting a ball is neither consistent nor engaging.

BMX: It’s Excitebike for the NES. There are multiple lanes and you drive left to right across raised platforms, obstacles to jump over, and boosts. The momentum is really weird though, if you failed on your first attempt at a challenge but ran out of time while still going fast, your second attempt will start you with whatever speed you had built up at the end of your previous try. The biking as a whole is fine, but there’s one really weird problem: Your objective is to finish races before the clock runs out. If you crash, you start again from the beginning, but the clock keeps going from where it was. However, it is IMPOSSIBLE to complete any of these races (with maybe one exception where there was time aplenty) after resetting this way, as there is simply not enough time left over to run the track. Definitely worse than Excitebike!

Fishing: This is done quite well! The mechanics for spotting, baiting, hooking, and reeling in fish vary for different species and you have to plan accordingly for each fish. It’s legitimately quite clever and didn’t feel like any other fishing minigame I’ve played before. This one impressed me!

Running: It’s the BMX minigame, but more baffling. As with the bike controls, you hold B to… pedal? There are running challenges in the regular levels where you just move around like normal, but suddenly when it’s a left-to-right footrace, it handles like a bike. It’s weird!

Volleyball: Another entry that’s sparsely explored. It handles fine, but it’s very bare-bones and it only happened like twice.

RC Racing: This is barely here, I’m not sure it really counts as a sport. It’s fine!

The vast diversity of activities is, in theory, a good thing! I definitely understand what they were going for, but they simply bit off more than they could chew here. Much of the game becomes filled with fetch quests, feeling quite similar to the low points of Sierra adventure games of yore. There’s a long late-game trade sequence in particular that is the worst kind of obtuse. For example, two identical NPCs are standing right next to each other and ask for vague help. It turns out they’re not conjoined twins, they’re glued together, and you need to pour oil on them to free them. Roberta & Ken Williams, eat your heart out.

But while King’s Quest games can be saved by charming dialogue, Sports Story somehow let me down hardest in this department. In my 3 playthroughs of Golf Story, I constantly laughed out loud through the whole journey. I adored every word, loved the characters, and was fully engrossed in the story. But this time? It is SO. BLAND. The last game had a fantastic rivalry with Lara, a hilarious relationship with an incredibly reluctant coach, a compelling late-game antagonist in Max Yards, a sleazy deal-with-the-devil situation with Lucky, and practically every other side character left an impression. But here? If you had told me this dialogue was written by the dev a decade before Golf Story while they were still finding their voice, that would have made complete sense to me. Any returning character is a shell of their former self, and I often couldn’t tell if the game was being legitimately serious or if the seriousness was meant to be a joke. There were maybe 5 times when the text made me smile, yet they went crazy hard on the sheer amount of dialogue this time. There are VHS tapes you can rent and TV shows you can watch which each drastically overstay their welcome with uninteresting stories, and any conversation you finish can NOT be skipped if you accidentally enter it a second time! There is a LOT of prattling on, and you’re gonna sit through it all, whether you like it or not. Though the dialogue when the houseboat was docking was legitimately great, and a good chunk of the final major area mercifully had some of that Golf Story charm, the writing as a whole isn't something you enjoy, it's something you endure.

And the GLITCHES, man. It’s hard to tell what’s an honest oversight and what just was never finished. Where you have to stand in order to press A to interact with things or people varies wildly. I got locked on a black screen while entering an area and had to reset. I made it to the other side of a crevasse (where I apparently wasn’t supposed to be) and when I spoke to a character there, the game tried to move me back across the chasm to where I was before, but my character wound up trying to walk into the abyss for a full minute before the game allowed the conversation to continue. There are a surprising amount of typos and misspellings. I accidentally blew up a button I needed to push by throwing a golf ball at it, meaning I could not complete the quest without resetting the game. (WHY WAS IT EVEN CODED TO BE BREAKABLE) Loads of purchasable items seemingly do nothing at all, including “Junk” which you can buy from popcorn machines (?!?!?) which only has “Junk it up” as a description. In Golf Story, every item has a purpose. But here you can quite easily waste all of your money on useless crap. There are entire quests which are inconsequential as well. Does anyone have a clue if something happens after you rescue all the flamingoes?? The aviary lady said she was going to be able to sell the building and all its birds now, but there’s no player reward of any kind.

And to TOP IT ALL OFF, the climax is as underwhelming as you could possibly get. The story just kind of quits, with a prominent character telling you “okay, you finished the other stuff, now there’s a big sports competition!” But unlike Golf Story’s championship at the Blue Moon Dunes, there’s barely any time spent building to this event, and you’re not directly competing against anyone. There are no clearly-defined stakes, no rivalry, no antagonist. Some mystical creatures randomly show up as you golf your way through non-golf scenarios, with seemingly arbitrary points being awarded, and then… you just win. I have no idea if there’s even a way to lose here, there was no target score or anything. I just... finished a list of uninspired tasks.

There are glimpses of something greater here. I really did want this game to be a masterpiece, but we got a rough draft of an ill-conceived idea. I’ve put in my time, and I will now refrain from ever touching this game again.

Oh, and the post-credits scene was arguably the most clever and funny part of the whole game. Shame it’s teasing a sequel that will likely never exist!