My son Charlie will soon be 18. Like all Scottish men before him, he is dropped on a Hebridean island with nothing but a rusty knife and his own anger. If he doesn’t make it back to the mainland, he’ll spend the rest of his life among wild, abandoned Scottish sons, and he’ll only survive if he likes sport, which is how any group of men survive forced times together.
He tried sports as a kid, but being on the autism spectrum, he was so obsessed with rules that he would pick up the ball and quit the game if he felt another kid was breaking them. He was basically a human VAR. It never ended well. So I decided to use my favorite 90’s video games as a Trojan horse. And there is only one starting point.
“Why is it called Sensible World of Soccer?” he asks over the intro screen after Xbox restarts. “Because it was the first decent football game, in terms of controls and…er…stuff,” I fabricate convincingly.
Retro… Sensitive world of football. Photo: Sensitive Software
“Doesn’t look very reasonable to me,” he says as tiny men rush onto the field. “Dude, that’s sooo retro!”
I hit him. Twice. Not much because it’s hard to score. The Xbox controller can’t match the easygoing brilliance of the old Cheetah Bug joystick, or maybe I’m just rubbish now. Charlie calls it “a fun, silly little game.” As if it were something found in a Christmas firecracker, rather than the Sistine Chapel ceiling of ’90s sports games.
“Are you into real football?” I ask. “Not in the least.”
We move on to NHL 94 Rewind. This plays like the original, but the players are more recent, so I can’t use Brendan Lemieux, Jaromír Jágr, Jeremy Roenick, or the others whose names we mispronounced in the Sega Mega Drive days. I destroy Charlie in two games because that’s what Scottish dads do to build character.
“What were you thinking son?” I ask while dabbing. “Not as exciting as Pint Size Soccer or whatever it was called,” he says.
“Does it make you want to play hockey?” I say. “No Dad,” he sighs, “I don’t want early onset dementia from repeated blunt head injuries. I like being able to read without moving my lips.” I can’t really disagree with that.
“Also, the Scottish genes have cursed me with bad teeth, but they’re better than no teeth at all.” But are they? Sometimes I felt like I would have been better off replacing mine with wood.
Transport me back… Baseball Stars 2. Photo: SNK
We need something light-hearted, so I’ll move on to Baseball Stars 2, a PlayStation 4 port of the 1992 Neo Geo classic. The graphics and tune give me the most intoxicating touch of nostalgia yet, transporting me back to my Notting Hill basement apartment . I can almost smell the unwashed Sunday League socks and Drakkar Noir.
Again it’s not the same. Again, the controllers are to blame. The Neo Geo arcade joystick was huge and solid, like playing with a piece of the Berlin Wall. Today’s PS4 controller seems tiny, soft and shriveled in my hands. Charlie gets annoyed because I use the classic tactic: slow pitch, then fast pitch, turn out, turn in. Steam pours from his ears. We’ll stop in the middle of the second game when I’m up 10-2. Charlie’s verdict? “It only reinforces baseball as the world’s most boring sport, which Americans try to legitimize with pointless statistics.”
We’re running out of games and time, so I play one of my trump cards: NBA Playgrounds, a modern take on NBA Jam. I know he’ll like it because there are somersaults, flames, people with huge heads, and he loved circuses. It’s a win. We laugh all the time. Charlie actually beats me in the first game, so I let him play again. And again. And again. Until he forgets his lonely triumph and begs to move on.
“Do you want to play basketball?”
“Can I do somersaults with flames coming out of my butt?”
“No.”
“Then forget it.”
“Charlie hits that thing right on the fairway” … Rory McIlroy PGA Tour. Photo: EA
Another roll of the dice. As my editor recently wrote, golf is the one sporty video game that everyone loves to play, even if they don’t play golf in real life. The oldest PGA golf game I can find is the Rory McIlroy PGA Tour from 2015. I’ve played this before, so to give him a chance Charlie plays the 92 rated Rickie Fowler while I play the 80 rated Miguel Ángel Jiménez.
I explain the intricacies of aiming, hooks, fades, wind and green speed, but Charlie interrupts me by yelling “LeeroyJenkins!” and hits the thing. Perfectly straight. Straight down the fairway. I don’t know if it’s a coincidence or a miracle, but that’s his tactic. all game. And it works.
It helps that his golfer is a young stud of immeasurable strength, while my guy has to get up three times a night to pee. Fowler can fart the ball farther than Jiménez can drive it. Charlie destroys me with his putting and wins by seven strokes, but says the clothes and running keep him from reality.
“But son, if you don’t like sports, you won’t survive among other grown men.”
“Don’t worry Dad,” he says with a hand on my shoulder and a patronizing grin, “I learned everything I need to survive from Fortnite.”
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