Simon Read's New Star Games specializes in sports games where you manage not a team but the career of an individual athlete; the New Star Soccer series demonstrates the virtue of this, providing a style of play quite different from either the high-res "you are there" gameplay of conventional sports games or the spreadsheet-like play of sports management games.
New Star Tennis is his latest outing; as the name implies, you're a tennis player on the international circuit. You plan activities week by week, including training, participating in a tournament, relaxing by playing minigames (darts, kart riding, going to the casino or betting on the horses), or shopping. Equipment can allow strength and stamina training, but also apparently to attract sponsors, you have to live some kind of extravagant lifestyle, so you need to buy crap for the sake of buying crap.
As this article makes clear, golf was originally an impromptu game played on landscape typical of the coastal glacial moraine of the British Isles. All of today's golf courses -- on terrain as varied as Hawaiian volcanic scree and Florida landfilled swamp -- essentially strives to recreate the landscape features of a forlorn bit of Scotland.
What if we got rid of that entirely, and instead created new games better suited to the landscapes in which we live? Arizona Desert Skeet-Ball, perhaps. Or even Brooklyn Urban Goff.
For which I will now devise the rules.
1. Before the game is scheduled to begin, the course master, henceforth to be known as the Goff Rebbe, shall determine the course. The course consists of 12 dinguses (because 18 is stupid and takes too long). Each dingus (corrresponding to a "hole" in golf) consists of one whatsis (starting position) and one dingus (target). No whatsis and its corresponding dingus shall be more than 200 meters or 3 blocks apart, whichever is smaller. The next whatsis should be no more than 25 meters (or one half block) from the previous dingus. Each whatsis and dingus should be a substantial fixed landmark feature, such as a lamp post, parking meter, or fire hydrant.
2. The Goff Rebbe shall indicate the location of each whatsis and dingus by marking it prominently. For courses expected to persist for some time, it is recommended that spray paint be used; a "W" followed by a number shall mark the whatsis, and a "D" followed by a number the corresponding target. For shorter-duration courses, the use of post-its is permitted. Each D location should contain, in smaller notations, an indication as to the location of the next whatsis -- in some cases, a spray-painted arrow may suffice, but in others, the Goff Rebbe may need to indicate a street location and corner (e.g., "4th & Union SW", the southwest corner of 4th Avenue and Union Street). Permanent-marker pens may be useful for this. When feasible, maps of the course should be provided to the players -- using GIMP to mark up Google Maps may be helpful here.
3. Each player will supply his or her own playing equipment, which shall consist of one (1) broomstick or mop handle, unscrewed from or sawed off from the actual broom or mop; and one (1) ball. Both india rubber balls and tennis balls are acceptable.
4. The players shall begin at whatsis 1. Each player, in turn, shall place his or her ball on the ground within one broomstick-length from the whatsis, then strike his or her ball toward the dingus.
5. When a player has hit his or her ball in such a way that it rebounds from the dingus, he or she is said to have "completed the dingus," and the number of strokes he or she required to do so is recorded, preferably in ink on the back of one player's hands, although in a pinch you can use scrap paper or your Twitter feed.
6. If a ball rebounds from some other object, e.g., a parked car or a passing pedestrian, you are required to "play it from where it lies," that is, to hit it from that position toward the dingus (but see rule 9).
7. Any injuries to pedestrians or property resulting from play of the game are entirely ascribable to the player, and he or she is wholly responsibility for any legal liability resulting therefrom. Players are entitled to wait a reasonable amount of time before making their next stroke, in order to avoid the danger of striking a pedestrian or some other object with their stick or ball. Players are encouraged to warn pedestrians and other players of the danger of an incoming ball by stating loudly the time-honored phrase "Wadjaback!" (analogous to Golf's "fore").
8. As in Croquet, it is legal to attempt to hit your ball in such a way as to move another player's ball to an awkward position.
9. If a player's ball is within 4 inches or 10 centimeters of an obstruction, such as a curb or the tire of a parked car, that clearly renders it impossible to strike the ball in the direction of the dingus, the player may move it to another location, at a distance not exceeding the length of a broomstick, so that a more direct hit may be made, at no penalty
10. In the event that a player's ball is entirely lost (e.g., over a fence into a locked yard, or down a storm drain), the player may place a new ball as close as possible to the point of loss, or within one broomstick distance of that point to allow for a reasonable backstroke, but incurs a one-stroke penalty.
11. Once the first dingus is completed, the players shall continue from the second whatsis, striking from within one broomstick length toward the second dingus -- and so on, until all twelve dinguses have been completed.
12. At that point, the player who, in completing the 12-dingus course, took the fewest number of strokes, is declared the winner. Players tied for the lowest score tie. Rather than retiring to the non-existent country club, it is suggested that players purchase beers from the nearest bodega, and drink them while sitting on someone else's stoop.
Other than, perhaps, the racing game, there's no game genre so set in stone, so lacking in innovation as the sports game, which survives (and from a market standpoint, thrives) simply by modest tech updates and new player stats on a yearly basis. And there are really only two kinds of sports games; ones that simulate matches in vibrant 3D, and ones that simulate team management in a spreadsheet dressed up with a few graphics.
Which is why Simon Read's New Star Soccer series, of which this is the fourth, is so brilliant; Simon Read is doing something nobody else does. New Star Soccer is a life sim in which you control the life and career of a footballer.
Okay, I'm going to start with the reasons why you might not like New Star Soccer to get 'em out of the way, so I can then say why this game is, in its own way, exceptionally cool.
1. I'm a Murrican! Fuckin soccer. Do I look gay to you? How bout them Gints?
2. Geez, the graphics look like I'm playing on a NES. If a sports game doesn't look better than the game on TV, is it really a sports game?
Stoked Rider is a snowboarding game with realistic physics (using Ageia's PhysX engine)--including fluid simulation and avalanches. You roam over a huge space--64 square kilometers of procedurally-created Alaskan moutains. No ski slopes, in other words--just you and the mountain.
In Arctic Stud Poker Run, you tool around a snowy landscape in a snowmobile. You and your opponents start from the same point, and each must end at the finish line, but you aren't constrained to a linear path. At various points in the play area are poker cards, which you can "pick up" by driving through them. When the game ends--after three minutes, that is--the player with the best poker hand who has succeeded in reaching the finish line is the winner.
Mel Brooks once said, "It´s good to be The King," but when he said that perhaps he was not taking into account the long history of abuse, excess, and belligerence that accompanies that title. It took a game to highlight the nuance. Queens is a brief platform game that, in the history of all the other dozens and dozens of genre-bending platform games we review here, uses one of the assumptions of the genre along with a clever coat. In this case, it's replay: every platform game has you trod along until some new thing or a timing issue kills you off, so you start the level over with a slightly refined neural map and maybe get a bit further. Then the next thing pops out and kills you and you keep at it until you get to the next checkpoint. In this game there are no checkpoints and every time you die you´re killing another innocent woman.
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