The Ringer-Verse - 'College Football 25,' the State of Sports Gaming, and Our Top Five Sports Games | Button Mash

Episode Date: July 18, 2024

Ben, Van Lathan, Diante Lee, and Steven Ruiz form a huddle to discuss the highly anticipated return of EA's college football franchise. First, they recount the history of the 'NCAA Football' series, what set it apart from 'Madden,' and why it was gone so long (00:52) before sharing their impressions of the new edition of the game (21:41). Then, they break down the consolidation of the sports gaming landscape (42:15), debate which sport translates best to video games (01:07:00, and name the top five sports games in each of their personal pantheons (01:14:00). Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Van Lathan, Diante Lee, and Steven Ruiz Producer: Devon Renaldo Additional Production Support: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Brian Curtis from The Ringer, and I want to tell you about the Press Box podcast. The Press Box is a podcast for anybody who likes news, whether it's about sports or politics or pop culture, and wants to understand how that news really gets made. We have news shows every Monday and Thursday. We have long interviews with everyone from John Crackauer to Joe Buck. Your social media feeds are bursting with information every day. Let us help you sort it out. Join us.

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doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. Hello and welcome into the ringerverse, your nexus feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, a senior editor for the ringer and the quarter munching, quarterback of button mash. In the LA studio, almost all alone, producer Devon's there too, but looking a little lonely. It's Van Lath and Van Van Van the Midnight Man. Welcome back to Button Mash. What is up? How are you guys doing? Doing well.

Always happy to have you on the show. I know your gaming goes way back, but on this show, I feel like you're playing the part. You're representing the role of the many millions of people who may not play as much as they used to. You know, other things get in the way. Life interferes. But you'll still answer the call when it comes from Call of Duty or a Madden or a college football 25. You're back in action. Old habits die hard.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes you just get used to doing something. it brings you so much joy that you have to stop your life to do it. And that's where college football 25 is for me. I have to stop life to do this. But start a podcast because that is what we are talking about today. And this is not just the Midnight Mash, a meeting of the Midnight Boys and Button Mash. This is a crossover not only between shows on the same feed, but between feeds.

We are crossing the streams here because we are being blitzed by two of the hosts of of the ringer NFL show, making their ringer verse debuts, welcome them in, give him a warm ringer verse welcome, ringer staff writers, Stephen Ruiz, and Deonté Lee. Guys, hello. How's it going? Things are good, man. I'm glad to be on.

Obviously, you know, I'm trying to get in front of and speaking with as many people on the staff as the newest face here, so I'm glad to be doing this, especially talking about a game like this. Yeah, welcome to the club. This is the collab that we never knew we needed, that we never knew what would happen. ringerverse and ringer NFL crossing over. I love it. And here is my question for our listeners, are you ready for some football, specifically some college football? Even more specifically,

some EA sports college football 25. And that is a serious question, by the way. I honestly don't know how ready the ringer verse is for some football because here's the thing. At the ringer, we cover pop culture and sports. At the ringer verse, we focus on the culture, except when Mal and I make Joanna talk about baseball. But today, we are talking some sports, though still in our inimitably nerdy way. If you have ever referred to football as sports ball or handag, it might seem like this won't be the button mesh for you. But here's the thing. Our goal here, our field goal, even, is to make this topic interesting and accessible, even if you're not a big sports person, because we know that some of our listeners aren't. And that's okay. But we're

reaching out across the aisle, we're appealing to you. Also, I promise that however little you think you know about college football, you don't know less than me because that bar is on the floor. While preparing for this podcast, guys, I googled whether my school has a football team. I honestly did not know. What did you go? I went to Georgetown. So, I mean, maybe I could be forgiven for not knowing that we have a football team. We do. Apologies to the Georgetown Hoyas, who definitely do exist. field in the middle of the campus. Yeah, you know, when I Googled that, that did start to come back to me. I was like, you know what?

Yeah, I walked by that for a while. In my defense, when I was there, it was under construction and you couldn't see it clearly. But the George Hahn-Hoyas, they do exist. They played in a bowl game as recently as 1950, I learned just yesterday, basically. So best wishes to them. Why are we talking about football? The biggest game in the country right now is EA Sports. College Football 25. It's the biggest game as we speak on Wednesday, even though technically it

doesn't come out until Friday because hundreds of thousands of people were willing to pay a premium just for a few days of early access to this game, which is a sort of scammy practice that publishers do now to try to part people from their money. But it works when there's sufficient interest in the game. And there's clearly enormous interest in this game. And we're going to talk about why. We're going to talk about the history of this franchise. And then we're going to pull back a bit and we're going to talk about the state of sports games in general, the evolution of the landscape of sports games, which sports we think lend themselves to video games the best, and maybe we'll also get into our personal pantheon of sports games at the end of the episode.

But let's start with the game that just came out or is about to why the comeback of the college football franchise is such a big deal. I'll let one of you guys lay this out. Give us a little bit of background. Stephen, maybe you can start. We can all kind of pitch in on the history of this franchise, why it's such a big deal that it's back. I think it's a big deal. It's back because it hasn't been back for 10 years. But beyond that, I think a college football sports game, or a college sports game in general, we haven't had one on the market since the last game, NCAA 14. And I just think inherently, building a college football team is more fun than building like an NFL team. Like cutting Austin Eckler does not give you the dopamine hit that offering a three-star

a scholarship does. And I think that's a big deal. And then the third point, which I think is underrated, is that it came out in summer and we were all kids off school. Yeah, I guess that's a big part of it, right? And this was, you know, 20 years like clockwork every year. There was a new college football game under different titles, but same series. And then it went away. And this was one of the most popular series in gaming, right? This was a perennial top 10, top 20 seller in the country, in the video game industry. And it was gone, again, as Steven just said, for a very long time, more than a decade. Dei, do you want to explain where this franchise went? Why has it been so long? Well, that was the point I was going to make, right? It's not just that the game left. It was really

yanked from the fans of the game and the consumers of the game because of the Edelbanon lawsuits. all the things that I think that college football and college sports in general has been kind of fighting in, you know, fighting between lawyers and in courtrooms over the last decade, trying to figure out NIL, trying to figure out what kind of player compensation should or should not be allowed. So that's the reason why we've gone without it. And it was up in the air for so long whether or not EA even wanted to bring it back, you know, and I've been listening to, you know, developers and producers of the show kind of talk about just how small of a studio it was that they were building this game out of. This is not like, you know, all of EA Sports put every bit of their resources behind this to make this happen. This was a fight even, you know, internally within the company trying to, you know, get this game off the floor and make it happen. So I think that there's no surprise really given the fact that it was so popular before the way it left. And I think kind of like this slow process of fighting to get back to this point, why the

interest is as high as it is. Yeah, Van, I wanted to ask for your thoughts on that because this is sort of a historically significant franchise, not just because it was such a staple for so long. and because of its past popularity, but because of the part it played in shaping the landscape of sports, right? This is a crossover between gaming and the real world. And if it had not been this series or another college football video game or college video game, it would have been something, right?

There would have been some other wedge issue that kind of cracks the NCAA's power and led to the empowerment of amateur athletes that we're seeing these days. But this was the thing that really got to. it started. And the significance of that goes beyond the fact that, yeah, we enjoy this game and we're glad it's back. Yeah, there was something interesting about playing these games back in the day to where

when you played Coach K, which was the basketball game, I used to play when I was a kid, you knew that you were playing with Edel Bannon. You knew that you were playing with Christian Leitner, but it was just random player, but you knew it was the guy, right? Then you got to the, there was an interesting

point to where I got to be the same age some of my guys who played for LSU and played for other teams and stuff and I would be playing with them on these games and I'll be like, hey, bro, man, you suck on the game, dog. Like, you suck.

Like, you can't hit a shot. You can't block nobody. Like, what's going on in the game? You know? And then I heard from them, like, it's very interesting that you're playing with me on this game and I get no bread for.

And that was the first time I was thinking to myself, how? It's probably not a great, thing that people across the country across the world are playing this game, you're not getting any money for it. Yeah, that crescendoed also, that issue, you know, obviously it was adjudicated with NIL and we've seen that change in landscape of college athletics. But also, this game also returns at a real interesting time for college football.

College football, to me, is more top of mind than it's been in a very long time. I think that's for a lot of reasons. the narrative surrounding NIL, social media, and the kids' ability to really market themselves and put themselves out there. And, like, you know, people like Caitlin Clark and Angel Rees from various different sports, even Paul Skeens when he was LSU,

and, you know, all of that stuff. So the game coming back right now, it feels serendipitous for not just the creators of the game itself, but also for college football, because having this game and having people be able to play it, extends the window of interest about college football and heightens the brand of it for people to be interested in it as well. Right. And it's not like the guys who are getting included in this game are, you know, making bank off it necessarily. It's not a huge windfall. A lot of these guys, they opted in for 600 bucks and a deluxe edition of the game, which is, you know, better than nothing. Now, that's not what Arch Manning is getting. That's not what other guys who are paid to promote this game are getting. And there are a lot of people that,

that age and kids and athletes who were just like, yeah, I get to be in a video game. That's kind of cool, right? I get some money on top of that. That's nice. But this changed the industry. And now it's back in a very different industry, as you're saying, in a different landscape, not just for college football, but also for sports games. Things have changed in the last decades, and we will get to that a little later on. Now, tell me about your experience with the old games, because this goes back to 1993 when it was called Bill Walsh. college football and then it was NCAA for many years. Did you guys have a favorite edition? Steven, when did you start with the series? Do you have a single edition that stands out to you?

I started with 03, I think Carson Palmer was on the cover of it. But my favorite edition was the Reggie Bush on the cover. No, it wasn't Reggie Bush. It was Desmond Howard. But it was the year Reggie Bush won the Heisman. I just remember staying up to like 3 a.m. playing that game. I got through like 30 Dynasty seasons. That was like the first time I really grinded in a video game. And I think that's why I had this attachment to it. That was the one where I really felt like a gamer, that first one. Yeah. What about you, Deante?

Same. I think it was college football, 03, NCAA football, 03 that had Carson Palmer. That was my first one. But the one with Desmond Howard on the cover, 2006 was definitely my favorite. Because it had what we know now is Road to Glory. I think it was called Race for the Heisman at that point in time. And that was really the first, like, mode that they had in the college football game, where you get to be one player, you control his entire career freshman year all the way through,

and they had all these kind of role-playing elements to it, right? Like, if you do or don't go to class, it affects your GPA. They would give you finals and you would have to take like these very kind of elementary level quizzes about math or literature arts or whatever the case may be. And it was all of those things that were in there. And then it also had a soundtrack. And that's been a big thing for the college football game is that it cost them so much just to get these fight songs.

and the marching bands perform in the fight songs that they don't usually have money for soundtrack for whatever reason they had one for that one and there's a lot of indie rock and old hip hop that was in the game and that just sticks with me yeah me myself and I was in the game and that's really stuck with me you know

if I could go back and revive my PS2 which has long been dead it would be to play NCAA Football 06 Old Man Van tell me you go back to Bill Walsh College Football in 1993 I absolutely do all the way back to the inception, man.

I'm talking about like, you know, the Nebraska's of the 90s, the Florida's of the 90s, the Florida state teams. All throughout high school, I mean, really, we used to play game roulette. After school, me, Ryan, and Dedrick,

it was between this game, it was between Bill Walsh, college football, Madden, and NBA Live, 94 or 95. And whatever we was playing at, even if we'd like flip a coin for it. And the thing that the college football games got right, in addition to the extra added features that came along,

like what Deontay was just talking about, because a lot of that stuff did not exist before. We were out there playing with ghosts running around on the field. We was just happy that. The obscurity of college football is part of its charm. Yeah. Meaning part of the charm of it is, you know, the NFL has 32 teams or, you know, whatever.

it is. But being able to lace up with, you know, the University of Louisiana at Monroe, being able to lace up with southeastern, being able to take Western Kentucky to a title, being able to do all of that kind of stuff, and to have the game be able to recreate and capture a little bit of the culture of college football, we just sometimes liked to play with teams and things that we recognize from our region. It really was the game that I played the most. Now, things changed when I got in college, because when I got in college, we gained different. And it became a lot more serious. So those, when they're talking about 2002, 2003, I'm in college at this point. And those editions of the game, I didn't really get as much into the road or glory stuff. Because at that

point, you know, you were literally playing for an extra 25, 430, for some chicken tenders, to see who's going to go to the store and get the fruit punch, all of that. So the game took on a little bit of a serious slant then. Last thing I'll say before I turn it back over, there is something that changed a little bit something that affected college football to me was the swell of popularity that Madden underwent from I'd say 2003 to like 2010

particularly in the Vic era of Madden Madden just became such a big deal that it swallowed up all of the energy around other football games that of course includes the 2K football games and this one. Now I think the enthusiasm around Madden is tamped down or turned down just a little bit to where people want to try a different football game.

And so it's another reason why it's perfect for NCAA to come back right now. Yeah, that's a good segue to what I was going to ask next, which is that for people who have not spent as much time with these games or are not as into football, and they're wondering, why do you need both this and Madden? Why do we need multiple football games made by the same publisher, EA Sports. Stephen, you sort of touched on this earlier, that in some ways, it's a different game. It's a more fun game to play with recruits, right? To have to plan a program like this.

I mean, if the gameplay on the field is similar in some respects, what is it that sets the CFB franchise apart where you say, yeah, there's room in my life for both of these series? It's what Ben just touched on. It's the options. Like, you can play with different types of teams. I can play with Navy, which is way different from playing with Alabama, whereas you play Maddo. everything's like the same. Like even if you watch NFL football, the offenses aren't that different. You watch college football schematically. They're so different.

And that carries over to the game. And also the team building aspect. You could build a team. Like if you build a team of Madden, you're getting a quarterback, you're getting a quarterback, building around the quarterback. And that's EAA. You don't necessarily have to do that.

So I think the unlimited options really like expands the game. Yeah. What do you think, Deiante? I think that Stephen hit on it. And the same with Van, right? Like, A, so much of the appeal of college football in general is its regionality. It is the obscurity. It's the fact that what USC means to me as a Southern California native is different than what

LSU will mean to VAM being from Baton Rouge, right? It's different than what, you know, Maryland might meet for Stephen, you know, or just people. Or what my beloved Georgetown Hoyas meet to meet. Right, you know. And I think that there's a level of engaging in that, right, that is very familiar to people. And that's a draw. Then there's the, optionality that Stephen was kind of touching on. The fact that I could play with Oregon and, you know, you do all the no huddle, you know, tempo stuff in the 2010s. I could turn on, you know, a triple option team.

I could play with Georgia Tech and do that. I could go play with Baylor back in the early 2010s, you know, and do the whole, you know, veer and shoot deep passes down the field off of play action and all the zone reads up. So there was just all these different ways for you to engage with the game in a way that feels, I guess you feel like you're a little bit in closer proximity with, what's actually happening on Saturdays. I think it's hard for people to get that same kind of emotional connection with Madden now. I don't know what that is. I don't know if it's just a matter of them kind of fragmenting people's attention spans with Ultimate Team and all the micro-transactions.

And that's something that's kind of infected all sports franchises. And then there's also just the fact that I think the NFL has almost gotten too big in some ways. You know, it's a little bit too disparate in terms of how many people it touches and it's reached just on pop culture in general. I think that college football, even as it's grown and taken on these billion-dollar TV deals and, you know, I think it's a little bit more package for the general fan now. There's still just a core feeling of how I feel about West Coast teams is different than how somebody in Texas feels about Texas teams, how somebody in, you know, the Pennsylvania area might feel about Big Ten teams. And I think that that's still the heartbeat of what makes college football special. Here's what makes this so fascinating to me,

even as a non-college football fan, just as an industry phenomenon, the fact that you had 100 of thousands of people playing this even before it officially came out. Clearly, there's this pent-up demand for this franchise. And maybe that would be the case regardless, you take something away that people are so accustomed to. And then you give it back to them after this long. Of course, there's going to be some interest in excitement. But it has been gone so long that, again, this series, it's like Rip Van Winkle or something. It's like coming back to a completely different gaming landscape. It's skipped a couple of console generations, right? Or at least skipped one. and here it comes back into a world with the PS5, with the Xbox Series SX, and it's not on old consoles, right?

This is built exclusively for the latest gen systems. And so you have people buying consoles purely to play this game because they're like, I haven't played a game in 10 years because I played college football 14 and then it went away, and now I want to play CFB25. I don't have the hardware to play those games. And so we've seen some console sales declining Xbox sales. struggling. Suddenly, it seems like consoles are sold out because this thing is a system seller. People are like, I want to play this game. I got to go pick up the platform to play it on. Also, it's coming out

after this extended layoff, which is a luxury that most gaming franchises, more sports gaming franchises, don't have because they're stuck on this endless cycle, right? This trendmill, this assembly line of we got to get a new edition of this game out every year, which only allows so much time and freedom and flexibility to tinker with things. Whereas this thing's been gone for so long that they're essentially starting from scratch. I mean, not completely. They're holdovers from the old teams that made the old games, but this is a rebuilt engine.

This is just a completely new look and gameplay system because they were able to do that. They were able to take their time, which is something that we just don't see anymore. So this game's been announced a few years. People have known that it's coming and they haven't rushed it, right? They took their time to make sure that they got it right. And it seems like they did. And that, I think, you know, Vin, you were talking about the lack of enthusiasm surrounding Madden these days. We'll get to that a little later.

But just the idea that, like, you don't know what you're going to get here, right? Because it's been so long, that's not a feeling that you're used to anymore with sports games. It's not. And also, because you've been playing so much Madden and people have still been playing so much Madden, you want to feel the difference in the gameplay. You want this game to be different. You want it to feel different. Obviously, the coverage is the schemes.

All of that stuff is going to be different, but you want to feel the difference in the game. And I was actually playing last night, and I was going through the drills with my Tigers, our quarterback, going to New York, Garrett Nussmeyer. Get ready for the Nuss bus to pull up in New York this December. We're going for two in a row.

for the houseman, okay? And there's a drill. One drill is impossible in the mini-games where, you know, it's a scramble drill. You're trying to scramble out after a certain time. They're throwing to a guy. And I'm used to playing with my chargers on Madden. And my big strong guy can make any throw.

That's right. You know, Herbert can make any throw. He can make any throw. Nuss Meyer can't. And the game really does, I haven't been able to dig into it as much, a good job of changing

the gameplay and the expectations of the college player, guys that aren't quite at their physical piece yet. That's another reason why you play. It's odd to say this, but you play the college football game as much for the limitations as you do for what you could do

in the game. So, an alternative, a viable alternative to Madden. We haven't had it in a while. And this is one. And people are just curious, man. So we've all spent a little bit of time with the game. I want to hear your early, early impressions here. Stephen, you've been playing online a lot. You're writing something about how to handle just being outclassed by people playing you on the internet. I want to hear from each of you maybe about what you're liking, what you still have some reservations about, biggest differences from the

previous games you remember. What stood out to you immediately, Stephen, was this more like, yes, my hands, my fingers remember where to go, the muscle memory is still there? Or did this feel fresh like something you needed to relearn? Unfortunately, I've been a loyal Madden customer for the last couple of years. So I've been playing the game. So I didn't have like that catch up period. But it felt different. Like what Van was saying, you want to feel it different. You don't want to play Madden 25 after playing Madden 24 and it feels like Madden 24. This felt like a different game. The thing I like is that you do it, you have to run on first down. You can't pass on first down.

You can't be this drop back passer. It's kind of what Van was talking about. If you do that, you're going to get killed, especially if you play good teams. I think that balance, like, makes the game much more playable and much more enjoyable. And it feels like a college football game. Deante,

where are you seeing so far? I think that just to kind of take a general look at what Steven's getting at, I think this game is just a little bit more punishing in ways that Madden is kind of lax, right? To Steven's point, if you just want to light up with two tight ends on the, you know, on Madden and just run the ball every play, you can kind of get away with that online. You know, they've done different things to try to dissuade people from playing that way. But if you want to just take like a MinMax approach to playing that game, you can do that.

In college, in the college football game, because I think the ratings are a little bit more tame and I don't think they're leaning as much into, oh, you know, we came up with some new feature where if this guy has this ability, you basically can't do anything to stop them. I think that they've done a pretty good job of balancing out gameplay in a way where you kind of have to play true to at least a bit what you would see on a Saturday. You know, you do have to take underneath throws. You do have to be careful about how you're playing in the middle of the field. You do have to really kind of lean on who your best players are. For me, I like to play Dynasty and take bad teams and just play games over and over and try to beat the better teams in the country. And it's a lot more difficult to do that in this version of the game than it was a decade ago. because they've definitely built it in

to be a little bit more punishing. And that's actually something that I've come to really enjoy this week playing the game. Have you seen the movie The Replacements with Keanu Reeves? He makes a speech about quicksand, you fall behind and then it gets worse and worse.

That's how the game feels, especially if we're playing like Ohio State. Like I played, I threw a pass on the first play of the game and I got sacked. And like the game was over from there. I couldn't catch up after that. It was over. Like he was sacking me every play.

Interceptions. I had to pass. I couldn't run anymore. That's why the game, feels good. Like in Madden, I can go to 3rd and 15 and handle that because I have Justin Herbert. I can roll out and throw 30 yards down field. With most of these teams, you can't do

that at all. Yeah. Yeah, you're not going to take the Hoyas to the championship in this game. Most likely, it's going to be a tall order. Van, what about you? You've been playing Madden, obviously, so I assume it's just like riding a bike. But what stood out to you as different from what you remembered about this series?

Yeah, with Madden, you know where you're, I've been running the same offense in Madden for such a long time that I really, really can't run my offense like on autopilot. I get in there, I'm making

offense and defense. I'm making checks adjustments. I'm putting people in flats here. I'm doing all of that stuff. In this game, it feels like college because, you know, the NFL has such fantastic athletes that most

NFL games, you feel like there's going to be some level of competitiveness there. When you go out on Saturday, you can get flattened at any time. You're playing an out-of-conference game against another team that's pretty good. You go in there and you expect to compete.

You have a bad day. You can get to 35, 10 pretty quick, right? Remember, LSU had a big, huge game against Oregon season opener some years ago and this game was on the docket all summer, and we just tortured them. Like, things went well for them at first, and then that old 100,

Badja started doing this thing. Like he started doing this thing. And after a while, we just ran away with it. That happens in this football game. It feels different. Sometimes when you're playing with an underclassman, it feels like an underclassman. It feels like somebody who's getting acclimated to something new.

And I think the game gets the really, the thing that I wanted to see the game get right was the cultural aspect of it. Yeah. When I'm in Death Valley, does it feel like I'm in Death Valley? When I'm in a horseshoe, does it feel like I'm in a horseshoe? When I'm in the swamp, does it feel like I'm in the swamp? And for the most part, like, the cultural part of college football, especially with the big teams, I feel like the game gets it right. I feel like I'm in the middle of it.

And I think one of the other reasons why people are so hype for this is that the series went out on top, at least in terms of popularity. It's not as if there'd been a long decline and people are like already, it's ready. It's time to retire this thing. or it needs a break necessarily. The 2014 edition of the game was not the best received one, but people have been playing that edition for the past decade because it was the most recent one available. And so you could get unofficial roster updates

and just keep playing that game. Now, obviously, this comes out two console generations later. It's going to look a lot prettier. But for you guys, was the bar here just sort of, hey, I want to play that familiar game that I knew and loved for years. I just want it now on a current console looking like it was developed in 2024 with updated rosters and locations, et cetera. Or did you want to see some big step forward because it's been gone for so long? Like, what did this game need to do to impress or satisfy you, Stephen?

I do think that's like a small underrated thing. It's like just like seeing Oregon's uniforms on a PS5 with PS5 graphics was like new and fresh and like seeing these stadiums. And I think they really leveraged the technology. What I wanted to see was them capturing college football, like not even just at the big stadiums, because you kind of got that in the old games, but like with the small stadiums. Like you go to Navy, and it's cool playing at Navy.

It's like really cool seeing the troops on the side of the field. I just played a game at Liberty, and it felt like I was at Liberty. I've been there a couple times for like Malik Willis's Pro Day. Capturing that for the small schools, I think was their goal, and they accomplished that. I don't know. I didn't go to a small school,

so I don't know what it feels like to load up my school on there and see if they got everything right. But I'd imagine that, they got 90% of it of it right. And that has to feel cool. Yeah, Deante, what stands out to you is sort of the biggest innovation or step forward or new feature in addition to the difficulty and the realism we were just talking about? I feel like I've been a parrot the entire time, but I'm with Stephen on this.

You know, I like playing with small schools and seeing the amount of care given to making sure that the stadiums are crafted properly, you know, and that they're designed well. I think it was very easy in older games for them to say, oh, you know, if it's New Mexico state, we'll just throw a generic render of what their stadium kind of sort of looks like and just put that, you know, kind of maroonish, you know, purple over the fans in the stands. And that's good enough because this New Mexico State, who really care that much about it. I think that they paid much more respect to just the fact that this game is regional. You know, if you were from the Pacific Northwest, it matters what Pullman looks like and feels like on Saturday. And if you're

playing with Washington State, you want to, you know, kind of embrace yourself in that culture. So I love the fact that they paid that much respect to the regionality of the game. As far as gameplay goes, I kind of hit on it as far as how punishing it can be at times. And then everything that I loved about Dynasty in the 14 game, I still have in terms of the recruiting interface. You know, I'm still kind of tinkering around with the transfer portal and all that. So I just love the fact that they did not skip over any of the things that make college football what it is in this modern era. Yeah. And as with any sports game, there are just so many ways to play, You can just casually pick it up and play, play online, play with your friends.

Or you can go in deep. It can take over your life. You can build a dynasty. You can explore all the features fully. Obviously, we haven't had a whole lot of time with the game yet. So what are you still sort of on the fence about or just interested in seeing as you spend more time with this game? Van, you've dabbled, you've dipped your toe in. What do you want to see more of before you finally pass judgment on whether this is a success?

So right now I'm in mini-game season. All right, I'm getting my skills together. I'm cobbling the skills. I'm seeing the way the total control passing works on this game. I'm seeing the way the mechanics work on this game. I got to be ready because what you guys understand is this is a big deal. All right. I'm going to be online versus Rara versus Ryan versus Ian versus Walter.

And some of my other friends who are disgusting Florida lovers. who are deranged Auburn lovers. I don't have any Alabama friends. I don't do that to myself. But some of my other friends who are ridiculous Texas fans, I can't lose against them.

Do you understand that I can't let Texas beat LSU? Do you get it? It can't happen. So I got to be ready to go. Yeah. So I'm looking forward to, yeah, I'm going to bring,

I'm going to take a three star, put him at quarterback. He's going to be from new IB. or somewhere like that. Am I going to get them the husband? Yeah, I'm going to get them to Hosman. I'm going to raise some more hardware

back to Louisiana. But I'm deep, deep, deep in practice mode right now. I have to be good because this is the one game that all of my fans are going to play. They care. They think Florida is a better program,

Sun Belt Billy. They think all of that stuff, I can't let them be right. You know? I can't let them be right. So right now, two weeks, I'm figuring out the kinks, mini-game mode,

training mode, and I'll check back in with button master. and let you guys know where I'm at. But right now I'm in the lab is what the kids call it, okay? Yeah. This is one of those franchises because it goes back 30 years, that this might be the only way you interact with some friends, right?

Like you might have NCA fan friends, right? You might have college football fan friends who you go way back and you play this series with. And this is a chance to get back with those people that you've maybe drifted apart from, right? Because this was kind of one of the bases of your friendship. And that's not just the case with sports fans. It could be the case with a clan in a shooter or whatever it is, right?

But this is one of those things along with, say, fantasy sports, like these games that kind of tie you together, bring you together, bring you back to an earlier period of your life and help you reconnect with that. Stephen, what have you not seen so far that you are looking forward to exploring further in the days and weeks and months ahead? Just to get a disliked on the table, like one thing that stands out immediately, and it seems small. is like the play art, how the plays are drawn out when you're picking them looks so weird compared to past Maddens and I have no idea why they changed it. And it's like disorientating. Like I don't even know what plays being called when I call it in the huddle. That's like my biggest complaint.

And the fact that that's my biggest complaint tells you how much I'm enjoying this game. I think I'm a van on this. Like when I was a kid, there were two games that I had to be good at. It was NCAA football and call of duty. I have long since relinquished my need to be good at call of duty. you know, with all the online play and the modding and people who have the hours available to get great at the game. I know I don't have that to offer as a dad.

This is one game where I am holding on to this for dear life. I have to get online and play. I've got to find out what the right playbook is based on my own style of play. I've got to figure out what team, you know, and how to, you know, configure the depth chart so that way I could get my running back playing a certain position in certain formations or my wide receiver playing running back in certain formations. Like, I have to get great at this game, you know, to Vance point, because when I play my homeboys, this was the game that we were up for four or five,

six hours playing nonstop. When I was in college, this was the game that we were on the couch, glued to eating pizza and drinking beers until one, two, in the morning, you know, when we didn't have anything else to do on a random weekday. So this to me is as close as I think I can get to that feeling, you know, playing with friends, that kind of brings back that old community feel that you would get from competing with friends and loved ones in a video game environment. So I'm going to be in every mode I can possibly be in to get as good at this game as I can because I've got to get good at it.

All right, we're going to zoom out a bit and talk about some other games. Before we do, any last thoughts on CFB specifically, anything you want to get off your chest about the new edition of the game, what you'd have appreciated about past editions of the game. Any other thoughts on this series on this franchise on the latest edition of the game before we move on. I'll say that I am still getting used to the gameplay, getting used to moving around the pocket, getting used to climb the pocket, getting used to the way your QB responds a little bit. And I think that's a good thing.

I think it's a good thing that my Madden skills didn't transfer directly to the college football game because college football is a different sport than the NFL. like it's it's it's not the same it's it's different it's specialized you have to do different things and so i like the fact that there's a little bit of a learning curve man i was in some of these little mini games and they was kicking garret nuss my ass at first like i couldn't get i couldn't get it i had to figure out a little bit it's for some people it may feel a little clunky but you're moving around with athletes that aren't at the top of their skill sets quite yet so i don't mind that little extra bit of realism.

Yeah, I think the one thing that they nailed was separating the star players from the normal college player. Like, you feel it. You don't even have to see the little star under their player. You can just see how they move. It just looks different. I think you have to nail that to get a college football game right. And they did.

All right. Let's pause briefly for programming reminders because there is a lot to get to. Van, we may have said this before, but I think we have hit peak riververse. I think this is the week that we are. producing more content collectively than this podcast has ever produced before. You just recorded the second of three Midnight Boys podcast. Has there been a three midnight week before? Is this unprecedented?

I don't know. It's a three midnight week. Yeah. I don't know if we've done three before. It might have happened, but I can't remember a time where he did. Yeah. I don't know if this has happened before. You did.

Hot D. Episode five reactions. You just recorded Ackolite finale. You have the boys finale reactions coming on Thursday. After we record this, you're going to do a live show, which people can hear on the feed next week. And then this Friday, every single day, we have a new podcast for you on the Ringerverse feed this week. On Friday, we're trying something a little new, a little different. We got a little experiment going on here.

Daniel Chin will be hosting a narrative episode of the Ring Reverse setting up Deadpool and Wolverine. I've been working on this a bit too. I've heard it. It's great. He has had a lot of access. He's talked to people. He's done reporting just to give some sense of the whole history of the X-Men franchise, how we got to the point where Deadpool would be the savior of the MCU,

that this would be the movie of the summer. I think people are going to really like that and be excited to hear that. So stay tuned. And of course, how's the bar chugging along, pumping out content too? They have already done their deep dive of Hot D. five and their accolite finale will be coming later this week. And then the cycle starts anew with Talk to Thrones on Sunday. Although I think after this week, it's not like things slow down, settle down. We got Deadpool coming up next, but this is maybe, this is peak week

right here, right? This is Hot Nerd June, which has bled into Hot Nerd July, where we've had all these shows running at the same time. Two of them coming off the board this week. And then we get to breathe a bit. We get to focus just on hot D the last few episodes and Deadpool and Wolverine, but we will keep the content coming. There's also more CFB-25 content coming involving three of you guys because this Friday, 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern, live on the Ringer NFL YouTube channel, there will be a tournament involving CFB-25 van and Jomey. Van's got to be in the lab for the next couple of days because LSU versus Colorado online live for everyone to see Midnight Boys Bragging Rights at stake. You got to put some practice in before you take on Joe Me on Friday.

Not just Midnight Boys bragging rights, but we get to see right now, you know, I think I think Colorado's starting this season with North or South Dakota, a big time game in the FCS or something. Like which is it, Deontay? Like which one is there, are they starting with it? It's North Dakota State, yeah. North Dakota State. Tough, tough game, loseable game. But that's not when the Colorado season starts. It starts on Friday. It starts on Friday with them taking on the LSU Fighting Tigers. We're going to see if Coach Prime and the boys in there in Boulder are ready for the big time.

Man, LSU is just the takeover these. Even in my world, even in the baseball sphere, it's all LSU all the time. It's the Paul Star game this week. It's Livy Dunn. It's Paul Skeens. It's everywhere. It's on everyone's lips. Paul Skeens.

greatest of all time pitcher heat thrower. Yeah. You love them. I do. Give them a game ball. It won't be just Van and Jomey in that tournament. It will also be Deontay going up against Austin Gale. So again, you can stream this live 3 p.m. Pacific, Ringer NFL.

It will then be archived on the YouTube channel afterward for posterity for anyone who embarrasses themselves. The embarrassment will live on. forever and you can access it anytime you want. So that is what is coming on the Ringaverse feed, on House of Our. ButMash will be back later this month too. You can email us at Ringiversegaming at gmail.com. This episode is brought to you by Spectrum Business. Fast, reliable internet means everything for your business. And even this podcast, that's why I trust Spectrum Business. They keep companies of all sizes connected with internet, advanced Wi-Fi, phone, TV, mobile services,

plus 24-7 U.S.-based support, millions of business owners already trust Spectrum Business. So visit Spectrum.com slash business to learn more. Restrictions apply. Services not available in all areas. This episode is brought to by Viori. When it comes to close, that score high in both comfort and style, Viori is my MVP. Sunday Performance Choggers? Oh, yeah.

They have the perfect. I could watch a game and then go out to dinner vibe. And the Meta Pant, that's my number one. I need to look like I tried option. Get 20% off your first purchase at viori.com slash Simmons and discover the versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply and visit the website for full terms and conditions. This episode is brought to you by Sweet Green. The day doesn't ask for permission.

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Garlic aoli. Crumbled bacon, corn salsa, 40 grams of protein. Made to keep up with whatever comes next. New sweetgreen wraps hit different. Order now at order. Sweetgreen.com. All right. Let's talk just a bit about the state of sports games,

the broader sports game landscape. There's some interesting trends going on here, and they're not all positive developments, I would say, which is maybe part of why everyone's so excited about CFB. It feels like something new or at least something old that's now new again, because what we've seen in the sports game landscape is that there's a lot less competition than there used to be, right? When we were kids, well, when Van was a kid, we weren't alive. But when the rest of us were kids, I'm probably between you guys and age,

I've spanned the difference here. When we were younger, that applies to all of us, there were more sports games. And that's not because there's less interest in sports or in sports games, or that these aren't still a big deal, it's that we've got monopolies going on here, right? Yeah. We got to get someone to come in and antitrust. We got to break up the monopolies when it comes to sports games because it used to be that you would have several options, right?

Even in the major sports, even the annual releases, you would usually have two choices, at least at minimum, right? You'd have two simulation choices. You know, you could go Madden or you could go 2K. And then you could go blitz, right? And there'd be some fun one and sort of less serious and more silly or bloody ones, right? There would be options. And now a lot of those options have gone away. And that seemingly has produced some stagnation, right? We could maybe say correlation, not causation, but it seems like there's some causation going to here to compare and contrast. I mean, Van, looking back as far back as you go to when you were deciding which. game you were going to get in any given year, there were just more choices, whereas now you're defaulting to generally the same game in a given sport every year. Do you see that as a good thing, as a bad thing? How did we get here? So it's overall a bad thing, but it was overall a terrible

thing, but it was very foreseeable. I'll tell you why. So there was a point, I would say, in like, 04, where Madden and 2K exist at the same time. I'm talking football here, right? Madden 2K. I'm talking for football. Obviously football when I say Mad. The 2K game was a superior game. It was a better game, right? I remember that it started selling it for like 20 bucks or something like that.

It was a better game. It also was an NFL license game as well. The problem was you couldn't get anyone to play it with you. Right? So the issue became that it didn't really matter about the gameplay itself, the cultural capture of the game. is what started to matter, what people were going to be on. And the name branding behind Madden was so strong that you could have invented or came out

with a football game that was fantastic and it couldn't compete. It happened the other way in basketball. The game that used to dominate basketball was NBA Live, which was the EA game. At some point, 2K. It takes over, yeah. It takes over. and now 2K has the branding to where NBA Live can't get its footing back. Same thing in baseball, by the way, right?

You had the show, you had 2K, now 2K is just gone. Right. The show is the only show in town. Right. So it's bad for the game because anytime there is a monopoly over something, your game creators, your creators are going to rest on their laurels a little bit and try to maximize. I don't like all the micro-bibis.

Madden Ultimate Team, stuff like that, that's not why I play. So obviously it's bad for the game, but it was totally foreseeable, it was totally predictable, if you looked at the way these things actually happened organically. You could see this coming

where everyone was on one game for better or worse. Right. And sometimes it's kind of artificial. Sometimes this sort of happens organically. I mean, you could look at 2005 as a turning point. That's when EA signs an exclusive deal with the NFL

to make Madden the only game in town, the only official. licensed simulation football game where you can actually play with the players and with the league. Sometimes it just happens because, well, competition does what competition does. And sometimes one team wins, right? Like one franchise is just better and drives the other out of business. Sometimes, though, it's that the barrier for entry becomes too high. It becomes prohibitive, right?

No one else can get into the game because, what, are you going to take on Madden now, right? even if there's no formal official exclusivity, A, the development costs keep rising because you've got this console. People are expecting higher and higher production values. It takes more resources to make these games. You can't jump in and just be the upstart, the underdog, the David, taken on the Goliath year. Now, you could pivot. You could do sort of something different, you know, not a simulation game, not a full AAA polish experience, but something sort of silly, something sort of fun, change of pace. But if you want to go head to head, it's just not really happening anymore.

And that can be a bad thing because it's not that the people making these games aren't working hard, aren't trying to make the games, you know, the developers, the programmers, they want the games to be good. It's just that the incentives aren't really there because what are you going to do? Are you going to boycott? Are you just not going to pick up a football game if you love playing football games? Or are you just going to get Madden, regardless of how good that year's edition of Madden is? How have you seen this manifest, Stephen? Yeah, I do feel like there's a chance

that the micro-transaction thing could end up being a positive in the long run because like we talked about, the developmental cycle is a year for sports games and they have to rush these things out. I do think if people are subsidizing that by paying for Ultimate Team, I personally don't do it,

that maybe these companies will be like we don't have to put a game out every year. We can put a game out every two years and still make money in the meantime because we're getting money from Ultimate Team. Just update the rosters, yeah. But going back to that 0506 period, I think that's when reviews started to get a little more toxic, I would say. I think I would compare it to how people kind of consume music these days, where it's like record sales and streams matter more than the actual quality of the music at some point.

Like when people are arguing online. And I think that kind of started in 05 and 06 with the Madden and 2K kind of rivalry. And that was really like a cultural war back then. Like you were either 2K or mad. And I was a mad in person personally. But I think that started. and then other sports games kind of ran with that. I think 2K killed off Live.

It wasn't the same situation as 2K and Madden. It was just it was a better game and Live was terrible. So I think that was a slightly different situation, but I do think there was the same effect on that competition as well. Yeah, Deiante, do you see some suffering, some decline in quality here? I would certainly say on the Madden side, I think 2K now, I don't know if I would say it's better or worse as much as it's just a different game.

because they've added so many layers of kind of like RPG elements with your my career and all the city stuff like I don't engage with that at all but I also understand like when I go to the barbershop and some a client's son is in there and it's talking about 2K that's the stuff that he loves that's the stuff that kids his age love and loves to engage with because they're kind of cosplaying the whole NBA superstar thing and that has its own pop culture elements to it so I think that I'm a little bit, I'm a little bit less miffed about like the quality decline or stagnation on the 2K side as I am with Madden because there was a point in time where not only was Madden just as good at terms of being like an arcade level game as like an NFL Blitz.

It was a great simulation game. You could go and do so many different things. I feel like you were getting an A plus experience out of it. The mini games are great. And I think the micro-transactions, well, I do think there's some logic in what Stephen is saying. I think ultimately, no pun intended, the fact the ultimate team has become such a big deal and a big moneymaker for them, I do think that a lot of energy has now just been spent on trying to keep people locked into the ultimate team world. And that's why you get things like this early release, even with college football, where if you pay the extra $20, $30, you'll get all these ultimate team points.

They are very much trying to usher people into the micro-transactions world because I think that they feel that keeping them there will keep them locked into the game. And if you're spending more time on that and more attention on that, that's less attention that you're spending really critiquing the quality of gameplay, right? You're just trying to, you're collecting things more than anything. If you turn on Madden 24, like no matter what game modes you're playing, the first mode that you can click on is Ultimate Team, and it never changes. And under that, it's like recommended based on how much you play.

And once you click on Ultimate Team, I don't know if you've ever done it accidentally. It takes like five minutes to get out of it because all these pop-up screens come up, like offers to buy players. Like, they really want to get you stuck in there. Can't be real with you? I don't understand it. This is another thing where I'm old. Like, I don't understand it.

Sometimes I watch, like, competitive Madden stuff on YouTube. There's this guy named T.D. Barrett. I love watching Madden plays on YouTube. I love watching it. It's fun. But, like, when they're playing in these tournaments, it'll be like, I don't know, Brett Farr throwing a Randy Moss and every, I don't understand, I don't understand the ultimate teams and all of that stuff.

I don't, I actually don't even get it. I have zero interest in building a team where everyone has 99 or all of that stuff. I want to play with the Saints from this year and get my head beat in enough to make me play with the Chargers. That's what I want to do. So like I don't even under, I never got on that part of it, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

And you can quantify this. And Neil Payne just did an interesting study on this on substack. If you look at the quantity and the quality of sports game coming out every year at the peak, 20 plus years ago, 2002, when you had the most options. And this is just looking at baseball, basketball, hockey, soccer, football. There were 37 games that came out that year, whereas now you're more in the realm of, say, seven. And it's not just that you have fewer options, but these games don't do as well at terms

of the critical response, at least. You look at the metacritic ratings of the highest scored games in each year. And again, you go back 20 years. the best sports games were universally beloved. These games got great reviews. They were always games somewhere in that mix in that field that would get 90s, you know. And now you're seeing the average sink 20 points or more where you're getting 70s now, if you're lucky.

Madden may be dropping into the 60s. And that's partly, I think, that the expectations increase over time. So it's not necessarily saying that this game plays worse than it used to, that it's gotten actively worse, though in some cases that's true. But it's also just that you expect to have something more than a re-skin, right, than just a fresh face or a slight graphical upgrade because that's what we had last year. We don't need that. You don't want to just get a game for updated rosters, which theoretically you could download. You want it to play better. You want it to do something that the previous edition didn't. But I think for a lot of people, it's just an annual tradition,

and they will pick it up, regardless of how good it is. And the publishers know that. And without that competition pushing people to improve, you might not necessarily, right? Like, do you guys read reviews of sports games? You know, if you want to know, should I go see this movie? Should I go watch this show? Should I pick up this book? Should I listen this album? Whatever it is, you have to make educated decisions. Do I want to devote my time to that? Do you do that same sort of process if you're picking up a sports game or are you just like, it's automatic? You know, I'm going to go get madden because that's what I do at this time of year. I just buy the game. And I do think there is like a phenomenon where like reviewers have gotten more cynical about games since that time period.

Yeah. I think like the 0506 period is probably when that happened. If you compare that to other games outside of the sports genre, I think it would probably be the same thing. But yeah, I just buy them now. And I think it was like that 0506 Madden 2K War where I decided that I wasn't going to read reviews anymore. One, because there's only one game on the market so you don't even have a choice. But two, I do think you felt like you had to be loyal to your brand. you have to be dug in with your brand.

It's like, I don't care. The console worse. It's the football franchise worse. Yeah. But especially now if you don't even have the choice between Madden and 2K, it's not like you can comparison shop, right? Like either you get the game that they serve you, even if it's some slap or you're going without a game that year.

So, Deonte, like, will you sit a season out if a game is not well received or if you will just sort of grin and bear it? I will say I don't look at reviews as actively anymore. not only are reviewers more cynical, I think, from like an institutional level. I think to Steven's point, if you just went on GameStop.com, while like I was in high school and early in college and just clicked on a ad and looked at the reviews, the way that people were talking about the game, you would think it's the worst thing that's ever been developed in history of video gaming, right? So I do think that the cynicism has kind of kept me away

from it because I do know the brands are so big now. And it's attached to something nostalgic for me, right? Like, I played these games with my dad. Then I played them with my Godbrothers, and I played them with my cousins. So there's something to it where I do think that they kind of have me held hostage in terms of whether I'm going to buy the game. I will say the longest I've gone is I've sat out on Madden for a couple of years. And when I was really, like, unhappy with 2K around the time that I was leaving college, I think I took like two to three years off on that. I think now it's more of, I'll wait until, you know, PlayStation Network put something on it's spring or summer or fall or holiday season sale and I'll just get it at a

discounted rate because I am a little bit offended sometimes at them trying to charge $80 to $90 for these MVP or deluxe edition bundles for a game that I know is just going to look, feel, and play pretty similarly to whatever the last year's edition was. Right. And if CFB is the exception and the early reviews are pretty strong, obviously there's a lot of goodwill for this game right now. does the industry take a lesson from that and say, hey, you know what? Maybe it might make sense to step back a bit or to take a gap year, you know, backpack around Europe and do some work on this game to make it a different product than it was the year before. Economically, that's hard to justify, right? If you're a gigantic publisher, if you have investors who are expecting that annual infusion,

that windfall of Madden cash, let's say, are you really going to tell them, yeah, we're going to take this year off. We're going to come back strong next year. year, right? And you can subtract however many billions of dollars from our balance sheet this year. We've seen that happen with some non-sports franchises where, you know, Ubisoft is cranking out a new Assassin's Creed every year. And then there's franchise fatigue that sets in, just like it does with the MCU or with Star Wars, right? It's just too much product. You're flooding the market. The supply outstrips the demand or the quality suffers. And people say, you know, I'm going to take a break potentially. Or maybe we're going to slow down the pipeline. But it's tough in sports gaming specifically.

when there's an expectation that, yeah, every year when that date rolls around when the new season starts, you're going to have a new game. You're going to have something new to pick up. Will there be internal competition at EA, you know, different developers making different football games, even if there's not competition from a 2K, let's say, if CFB is well received, then to the Madden developers say, hey, we've got to pick up our game. We've got to take a cue from this other EA football game that's out there, right? That's some form of competition, I guess. what does an annual release sports game have to do for you to be satisfied or at least not to feel like you sort of got scammed? You know, like what bar van for you does it have to clear where you feel like, you know what?

I'm glad I got this new game. I couldn't have just sat and played the old one for another year. So Madden is not a restaurant. It's a club. Right. Right. You go to a restaurant because the food is. good, mostly.

You go to a club because everybody else is going there. So during the pandemic, I was in a 32 team real Madden League with all of these guys, these pro ballers who are just got way too much time on their hands. They're picking everything off.

You make a mistake, they're picking it off. One time I threw four picks in the first half, I'm like, yo, y'all, y'all too good. I actually hired a Madden coach. I hired a Madden coach. I got in the lap. Absolutely did. How the Madden coach

got in the lap. Anyway. So, you know, that's the thing about Madden. It's a club. It's not a restaurant. So you're going to buy the new Madden because everybody's playing the new Madden.

They update the game three or four times during the season to reflect the actual rosters and all of that stuff. So essentially you get a new game, you know, because you get different teams, you get the game reflecting everything. That was the thing with the old.

game, the thing with the old game back in the day is, with them opening day rosters was locked, that was the squad. If somebody got hurt or somebody got traded or whatever, that was the squad. Yeah, you could do your manual edits if you want. Yeah. But yeah. The game is essentially new a couple of different times. It doesn't change, but the capture that it has over people is that them leagues that

you're in and them head to heads that you're going to do, a lot of those are going to be on the new game. And if you don't buy the new game, you're going to be standing outside the club. Deonti, Steven, is there an example that comes to either of your minds where you picked up a new edition of the game and you were like, you know what, this didn't just fail to build on what you served me last year. You went backwards. This is worse. Like, you have broken a good thing, you know. So let's rewind. I want to play last year's edition because you have actually actively sabotaged your series. I would say like Madden 11 through. 19, like a whole decade of Madden. That was the case. It was getting worse every year.

Like, there were a couple of Maddens that I bought, because I would buy it every year. I wouldn't even think about it where I never even finished one game. Like, I would get to, like, the second quarter and be like, I'm not enjoying this, so I'm turning it off. I think it was like Madden 17 or Madden 18. So I would say Madden was the poster child for that sort of phenomenon. And I think it's the one that's held up when we talk about the state of sports games right now. All right. I want to wind down with a few big questions here. First, what is the your ideal balance between realism and fun when it comes to sports games? How arcady do you prefer for your sports games to be? Because this is something we were talking about earlier with

CFB, that it's actually tough, that it actually does sort of simulate if your team sucks, if this player sucks, he's not going to be good in the game either. Do you like that or do you want to feel like this is a video game? I can be good with anyone. I can put some time in and it's not super serious, I can kind of figure out how to break this game and exploit it. Like, do you want it to be punishing? Do you want it to be? And of course, you know, there are games like football manager and out of the park baseball, like these text base Sims, baseball mogul, et cetera, that will let you go as deep as you want, right? But when we're talking about this sort of annual, you know, high production values simulation style game, do you want it to be forgiving or do you want it to be

realistic? How do you feel about that, Stephen? I play for. I play for you. football managers, so that should let you in on by my mindset. Like you said the word fun, like, I'm not playing these sports games to have fun. I'm playing these sports games to be frustrated. It's a business. And to overcome that, yeah. So I wanted to be as realistic as possible. I honestly think Madden and now college football have pushed in that direction.

Like, I think this is the most realistic football game in terms of how X's and O's kind of interact with each other that we've ever had. Like, even compared to the best football games, like my favorite game, which we're going to get to later, is Madden O5, the one with Ray Lewis on that. the first hit stick game. Hit stick. If I went back and played that game, like Matt said, once they put out the game, that was it. I remember one Matt, and there was a glitch where when you ran play action, if the receivers

had their names under them, like you could tell it wasn't a run play. And they could never fix it because they couldn't do patches like they can now. So I think the quality of games has gotten a lot better. And so because of the realism, I'd say 2K is probably, the basketball game is probably the most realistic game in terms of like one-to-one comparison to the actual sport. And that's really the only reason that keeps me coming back to 2K. It's not the other stuff around it. What about you, Van Deante?

Do you just want to be the unstoppable guy who's just running down the field, breaking tackles? Or do you want to be tackled because that's how football works? I mean, I buy the license game because I expect it to simulate what I actually see, you know, in live situations. Like, and this is something I was thinking about, you know, when I was trying to put together a list of my favorite sports games. And when you really focus in on, you know,

licensed versus unlicensed sports, it really kind of painted a picture of how things used to be a little bit more diverse when I was a kid. Like, I was scrolling past like SSX tricky. And I just remember how many hours I spent on that. Like I could get all my arcade, you know, fun out of that. Fight night, you know, round three. I used to just play that. Not because I really wanted to simulate boxing, but because I could get the guys that I was familiar with. I could get Bernard Hopkins.

And I just want to fight everybody. That's a light heavy weight. I want to fight every middleweight I can fight with these guys. You know, so that to me, I think was, you know, that to me I think was the most disappointing thing of putting this together. So to answer your question directly, is that I want these license games. If you guys are going to spend the money to say that we are the official NFL game,

we are the official MLB or NBA game, I wanted to as closely reflect the action that I would see if I was turning on a game on Hulu as it is, you know, picking up the sticks. Everything else can be for arcade for me. Is that how you feel, Van, or do you just, you want to be Bo in Techno Bowl? So I want the games to be like Captain America in the comics and not Captain America in the MCU. Okay.

Captain America in the comics is peak human. Right. All right. So he peak human. He can lift 800, 900, 900 pounds, maybe a thousand pounds. You know, he can bitch press that. No, dudes can do that in real life. You know, he can run.

He can do all of that stuff. He's got, he's different than what a real life person is. But peak human is fine. But Captain America in the MCU, you know, hold a helicopter as it's trying to fly away. And like, they gave him a little bit of a boost. A little of it was a boost. It run 13 miles and three minutes, five minutes or whatever it was, okay. I don't mind a little sauce.

I don't mind being like, damn, man. Randy Moss, I don't mind that. But the first versions of these games that we played, it was out of hand. It was too much. And that's why Vic 2004 is as high as I want to go on the, we can't stop this motherfucker list. Right. Because you guys, it was a frustrating fall.

Oh, my God. Okay. He remembers. I'm a Panthers fan, so I remember that. I'm not playing the game. Yeah. Like, seriously. Odd job and golden eye. Yeah.

Like, I'm not, bro. Odd job and golden eye. Sitting down, we're all playing golden eye. Somebody picks odd job. I'm not playing. Yeah. Get the game. Cut the shit off.

And the Vic thing, you just got to a point. I'm sitting down with my cousin. I'm like, man. you're a hole, bro. In that serious, you start looking at your friends. You start throwing punches. You start throwing punches.

You're a hole, bro. Like what? Like pick somebody, I'm not doing this, bro. I don't want to do this every time. Pick somebody else. That's the level of cheesiness. And it just comes out from there.

And they figured it out. Took them a couple of years, but they figured it out. All right. This could be divisive, but I need an answer from each of you. What is the best video game sport? does need to be your favorite sport in real life.

Which sport produces the best video games or translates the best to video game form? Steven, start us off. I think there's two different answers. Translate the best, I think is baseball just because it's the easiest to capture because it's a one-on-one thing. I think the best one is probably FIFA soccer

just because I enjoy the video games way more than I enjoy watching. And I enjoy watching them a fair amount. But I can pick up a FIFA game and just enjoy it, even if I'm into soccer at that time or not. So I'd say, I'd say FIFA. I'd say football is probably the hardest to capture.

What's your vote, Deante? It's the same in both facets. The thing I love about FIFA and the show is the fact that you can turn it on, it's kind of low stakes, right? Because the games are not fast-paced. It's not very granular. You can make it that if you want to really dig into the details. But if I just want to pick up, you know, MLB the show and play as the Dodgers,

I can just get in the batters box to show, hey, I was honey. And that's going to be a good experience. and it captures, I think, the feel of a baseball game pretty well. And the same with FIFA, right? Like, soccer can be a very complicated, complex game. But if I just want to play as Barcelona, I can do that and just pass a ball around and just shoot goals, right? Like, it kind of has the best balance, I think, of the visuals, the actual level of gameplay,

the difficulty, and trying to replicate what you would see if you just turned it on a TV. Vand? So I'm going to tell you why I'm answering this question, because I'm going to answer this question based upon not only the translation of the sport, but about what you can actually learn about the sport while you're playing it. FIFA is by far,

it's, FIFA's like, a great answer. But I'm going to say golf. I was thinking about that. Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to say golf because when you're playing golf, you, but FIFA's the same way as well, but when you're playing a golf game, like a really good golf game, you get into the weeds of golf so much.

Like, it's the kind of game when you play it, it makes you actually want to go out and play golf. Yeah. You get into the weeds and it's very translatable, the clubs,

the different courses, what you have to do, all of that stuff. And I really enjoy playing golf games. It's interesting. I'm a baseball guy and I've played a lot of baseball games and I've loved a lot of baseball games,

but it's not the best video. game sport. I like a video game sport that provides that continuous action. So I think I'm with you guys. It's either FIFA for me or I'll at least throw an honorable mention to NHL. I like hockey games. I like, can I say something about NHL? I played it recently on the new generations. It's like too taxing to play. Like I played one game. I'm like worn out. I'm like, I can't do this again. Hockey's intense. I'm like actually sweating. Yeah. No. I like right. It's it's just that more kind of dynamic, kinetic thing to it, right? And look, I love baseball. It's my favorite sport. I like the cerebral aspect. I like the tactics. I like the strategy. I like that even with a

pitch clock, you have some time to look around and build some suspense. But when I'm playing a video game, I want to be pressing, but I want to be butt mashing. I want to be twirling those joysticks. I want to be sending guys to every corner of the field or the ice, right? It's funny, none of us mentioned basketball. I don't know that we're down on basketball. I don't know that we're down on basketball games or just generally not the standout. My nephew hit me for 65. My nephew looked at me. He said, Kobe's going for 65.

I'm like, there's no way. And I'm like, there's no way. You're not going to score. He's like, Kobe's going for 65. This motherfucker was unstoppable. I haven't played 2K since. There's nothing I could do. I'm not going through that.

So I think they lost the plot in the basketball games a little bit. I haven't played a basketball game in a while. I'm with man on that. Like, I've talked with young. kids who play the game and they'll say things like, oh, you know, if you have this badge, once it gets to this level, all I have to do is X, Y, or Z, and there's literally nothing you can do to stop it. And there is that kind of like cheesing element to the basketball game that exists. I think a lot of it is like, what was started with good intentions with creating

badges, I think to try to differentiate players that were similar in their overalls. I think now they've kind of leaned a little bit too hard in that direction to where like, it's not, it's not a fun experience playing it online, whether you're playing up against an actual team or whatever, you know, created player that they have for their my career. It's not a fun experience. It's also not fun online because I feel like basketball timing matters so much.

Like you have to time the shot. You have to time your crossover. You have to time like if you're guarding someone 101. And 2K has notoriously had bad servers. And like that has been the case my whole life playing 2K. And like that makes it unenjoyable playing online. And then you add on like the cheesing element, which I think is like the easiest in basketball and it's just not enjoyable experience.

Yeah. Even as a non-s soccer enthusiasts, for me, it's probably soccer, maybe followed closely by hockey, and then got to give some love to tennis games too. Tennis games are great. Oh, they're so fun. Yeah. And I mean, look, Pong is tennis, basically, right? Like it translates to the video game medium, just that mesmerizing back and forth that

is really, really satisfying in video game form. And sort of, you know, simple, but still extremely satisfying. So, you know, a lot of world-class athletes, they play a lot of sports. They're Jacksville trades when they're young and then they specialize as they get older. They focus on one sport. I haven't done that, really. I still just play probably more games in other sports than the one I actually follow most closely. And I guess that takes us to our last mini topic today, which is what are our favorite sports games of all time.

Now, just to narrow it down slightly, I'm thinking mostly let's stick to like licensed simulation style games, you know, not like Wii sports or Mario Golf or whatever because like my list would probably be all Mario Golf and tennis. So I'm trying to stick to like, you know, actual realistic mimicking leagues and players kind of games, although if you want to go off the board and take a, you know, Tony Hawk or as SSX or something, you can do that. Van as the guy who goes back to TechMobile and Mike Tyson's Punchout. You want to start us off here? So Punch Out is, it was it for a long time, but then, you know, Punch Out is living off

of a lot of nostalgia. Punch Out is fun. But Punch Out is living off of a lot of nostalgia. There was a game that came out after that was called Greaties. Heavy Ways Greatest, Heavy Ways was better, but I love boxing games more than out, like, a lot stuff. So I got to go with Five Night, Fight Night Round Two. Like, I love playing.

Fight night. So frustrating. Very dramatic. Remember, it's as dramatic as a real boxing match. Madden, you can stew in it for a second. Think I played the most Madden, but fight night, it is high leverage, high energy. You're getting hit with the same left hook four or five times. You've got to figure something out. The cut men and all of that. The fact that there's not a great boxing game on the market right now is crazy. But those games are probably my favorite to play with people. What else would be contenders for your pantheon, your top five? My top five. It would be Fight Night round two, be Madden. Just all the sequels to Fight Night, basically. All the series of, it would be Madden.

Which Madden? Which, do you have a favorite edition? Honestly, bro, it's going to be 95, bro. And I know that's whack because it goes way back, but that's how I used to get down with Randall Cunningham. Like, it's going to be 95, man. It's going to be 95, man. Tiger Woods, PGA Golf, the one from 17 was my favorite one.

I played that one a lot. FIFA, but I can't remember the year of the FIFA. I'm going to be honest with you, but it was FIFA on the Sega Genesis, though. This is the old FIFA. Yeah. Because they had on the old FIFA, the first year they had it, they had outdoor soccer, but then they had indoor soccer. And sometimes we would play indoor soccer,

and the scores of the indoor soccer games on the, the FIFA the first year and it had it would be like 29 to 26 because you're just scoring so much. Other than that, it would be Tecmo Baseball as well, was one of my favorite ones as well. I'm going back and going deep into my bag and play a tectmo baseball, man. Steven, what you got? I have Fight Night Round 2 on mine too. That's the game outside of Madden that I probably played the most. Being Antonio Tarver with the long reach and the jab, like that was my game.

I would add Madden 06. I'm going to go actually a year after the race. Lewis one. I like the passing tone. I know that was like a... Bring back the passing. Controversial feature of the adage where you had to move around like where the quarterback was looking. It was kind of racist too.

Like Michael Vick had like the smallest one ever and Peyton Manning could see the whole field. But it was a good feature and it like replicated being able to like look off a safety or something. And I don't think we have that in these games. I think that's like the one thing Madden's missing these days is like actually going through the process of being a quarterback. But you could play. with,

I'm trying to think about back, like Zach Wilson as if he was Tom Brady and Madden, which shouldn't be the case, and I don't know how they replicate that, but I think the passing tone is one way to do that. Then I had college hoops 2K8,

that's someone with JJ Redick on the cover. That was like the last college basketball game, and it was really good, really deep, kind of like college football 25. And then I'll say 2K10. I think that was the year they had like the Jordan challenges. That was a fun basketball game.

It was before the game got cheesy. It was before the micro-transactions took over. That was like the last good 2K game to me. Deante, what you got? I think Stephen and I lived a lot of the same life because some of my instances are pretty similar. Madden 06 for me is in my top five. I don't know if it's number one, but it's definitely in my top five because of the passing cone. And, you know, at that point in time, the mechanics of like playing defense and all that obviously aren't as sophisticated as they are now. And even today, they have a lot of problems. But the thing I liked about the passing cone, when you're

playing one-on-one games, it does kind of keep people from cheesing the passing game. Like, you really do have to take some time and be patient and learn the mechanics of moving your analog stick from right to left or, you know, picking a team with a quarterback that actually fits your play style and not just being Michael Vick and scrambling back and forth from numbers to numbers before you uncork some 55-yard bomb, right? So I love Madden 06 for that. That's probably my favorite football game. Favorite overall, I think I'm with the consensus here. It's fight night round two.

I used to be James Tony. Like, I always wanted to be like the big, like the chubby or kind of sloppy looking light, heavier heavyweights. And I'm just throwing hooks and uppercuts all day, not really trying to play any defense at all, you know, not blocking any punches, not weaving at all. I'm just trying to get a knockout in the first three to four rounds. Tiger Woods, PJ Tour 2003. Like, I can still vividly remember just being on my PlayStation 2.

forever with my own player, trying to get the attributes right. Like, I probably learned more about golf from that than talking with my grandfather who's an avid golfer or actually turning on, you know, the PGA tours and watching the U.S. Open or the Masters or anything like that. Like learning what a wedge is, learning what the irons are and what they do, learning what the woods are and what they do. I spent countless hours on that. And then my last two will be college troops 2K8. Like, I still vividly remember the MF Doom song on there. I think it's MASH with the J. Dilla beat. Like, that was as a kid who was kind of in his backpack rap era,

listening to Slum Village, listening to, you know, all that type of music, Neal Soul and all that, like hearing MF Doom, Mad Ville, and all that stuff. Like, I loved hearing that. And it was a very, like, in-depth college basketball game. And then the last one on my list is one that I referred to earlier as NCAA 2006. The soundtrack, the race for the high. Eisenman mode, being able to play with all the schools. I think they were adding like one AA schools during that area NCAA football as well.

So you could play with a really small school and kind of transfer them over to the Sunbelt or the Mountain West or the whack and see if you could build a school up that way. That's easily my top five. And like I said, if I had a PS2, I'll probably spend more time on those five than any of the new properties that are out now. Man, we used to turn that passing cone shit off. scared to compete we used to turn that shit off man but we I've never I've never played a full game with that shit on

I'll be honest with you I played with Aaron Brooks once and I think that his passing cone was as small if not small like a little skinny ass We used to cut that shit off Like the only two games we was playing We was playing that and we was playing Nah I'm in my nostalgia feels

Who was playing Halo 2 like it was a fight game The whole living room The whole liver room was Filled with people just mad in Halo 2 Mad and Halo 2 Yeah I'm not hearing blitz, hits, slugfest, street.

I don't like that type of games. Nothing along those lines. I don't like that type of shit. Those are for kids. Yeah. I can play those games. NBA Street Volume 2 is good. Like, I love playing the game.

Like, I love the feel of it. But no, it doesn't compare with some of the other ones that we've talked about so far. All right. My five. First, I'm going old school, NBA jam. How can you not? I love that. Arcades, Genesis, S&ES, whatever edition, the best.

holds up still. Also, Virtua Tennis. I mentioned, yeah. I do remember that. Yeah, that's a good one. That was in the R-KACIS. Yeah, it was first, and then Dreamcast. I think Dreamcast was like peak sports gaming

or just peak gaming in general for me. So Virtua Tennis was just incredible. I just, I remember that roster of players on the Virtua Tennis games like it was yesterday. Yeah. NHL, a lot of people will mention 94, obviously, the Swinger's scene. or 14 is kind of acknowledged as the more modern classic. I'm going to go NHL-07, which was the first year they had the skill stick mechanic,

where it was like not just, you know, press a button to pass the puck, but like you could actually puck handle, you know, you can like deek, you can move the puck. And it felt to me so much more realistic in still a fun way. Just like, I can, you know, put this between guys' legs. Like, I can just go around them, you know. It's not just about timing, but also. about maneuvering, that was transformative for me. That's actually something I think of, you know, I wonder whether people are more disappointed in sports games now

because, like, there's only so much more you can do, you know? Like with non-sports games, you can keep building bigger worlds and just more impressive settings. Like, sports games have always, to some extent, been about just modeling the real life sport. And maybe we've gotten to a plateau when it comes to being able to do that in a realistic, life-like way, where it's just what else is there? I mean, we can have franchise modes.

We can have narratives. We can get Spike Lee to do the story or something, right? But like the actual game on the field, maybe it's just hard to make the strides that sports games did going from, you know, eight bits to 16 bits to 3D to HD, right? Like maybe there's just only so much you can do. And maybe it's just hard to sort of deliver that same jolt of like, oh my God, like I've never experienced this before. rounding out my top five, I'm going to go with NFL 2K1. I think that was my peak.

Again, a Dreamcast game, a few years before the 2K series faded out. 2K1, 2K, 2K2, those games were great. And finally, I have to have a baseball representative on here. So I'm going to go with MVP baseball 2005, which is just kind of the acknowledged classic.

Again, that's an all-timer. It is. There's no MVP anymore, right? I think that ran through 2007. That was the successor to triple play. And 05, that's just, that's the one where they nailed everything. I wrote a piece for Grantland in 2015 where I was like, 10 years later, people are still keeping MVP 2005 alive. And now it's like been almost as long since that article I wrote as it had been since the game came out at that point.

And still, I don't know that it's been surpassed or supplanted. That game is incredible. And you can name, you know, Ken Griffey and just like, you know, backyard baseball or So many other classic baseball games, but I think that's the peak for me, MVP 05. All right. I know we made some people mad here snubbing their favorite sports games. It doesn't mean we didn't like those two. I think we have done it.

I think we have successfully completed a sports podcast on the ringerverse feed. It can be done. No nerds versus jocks. No one got stuffed into a locker here. We talked about sports. I mean, you know, even the people cover sports for the ringer nerds, myself included. So it kind of works. But I'm glad you guys were here for this inaugural experiment in sports talk radio on the ringerverse van.

I know you've got to get to a live show. Always a pleasure to have. I wish you well against Jomi. I'm not taking sides. I like Jomey too. You know, I hope you guys both do great, but someone's got to win. I just hope you've got to embarrasses yourself. You need to make a decision.

Okay? Yeah. Me and I don't know if you guys know, Stephen Deont, say, me and Ben, we bonded. We took a walk around Central Park one night. We talked. You never done that with Jomi. It's disgusting. By rooting for me, you're also rooting

for me, you're also rooting 2025 national champions. Yeah. It's the origin story of our relationship. A moonlit stroll in Central Park. That's how all great relationships start. Deante, Stephen, so happy that you could come to our humble ringer-verse feed If you ever want to talk about video games on ringer NFL, I don't know why that would happen, but I'm here.

We can do a home-in-home. We can return the favor. So great to have you guys on the Ringerverse. Whenever you do a football manager episode, I'll be there. I'll be the old. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

And good luck to you, Deonta, in your fight against Austin as well on Friday, bragging rights and state. What's your team? What's that matchup going to be? It's going to be USC. Like, Reggie Bush grew up in a neighborhood not far from where I grew up at. So that's home team for me. And I'm playing against Colorado. So I think I've done a lot of pissing off of Colorado fans over the last two years,

and I'm certainly not done. Can I fill out my bracket? Can I make some predictions for the tournament? Yeah, please. That's the impartial observer, non-participant. Before this pod, I would have picked Deonté to win it because he's a football coach, I just assume. But after hearing Van say he hired a Madden coach and you talk about doing hot routes

and putting people in the flats, like I think he's going to win. I don't think Deonti's ready for that. I'm probably not. I'm certain that I'm not. I'm almost, bro, I'm sure I will lose. When I tell you that the little sack, the little passing sack dummies are kicking my ass, I got a lot of word to do, but I'm going to be on it today and tomorrow, though. All right, you can see how it all goes down.

Ringer NFL, YouTube, live stream 3 p.m. Pacific, 6 p.m. Eastern on Friday, and thereafter on the Ringer YouTube channel. Thanks to Devin Renato for producing today's podcast and to noted football fan, Arjuna Ramk pal, for his senior podcast management. But Mesh, we'll be back at the end of the month. You can contact us at Ringiversegaming at gmail.com. In the meantime, with your takes on sports games or anything else, stay tuned to the Ringiverse and House of Ar for coverage of the Acolyte,

The Boys, House of the Dragon. We're going out with a bang and a burst of flame. And Deadpool and... Wolverine next week. Hot, hot, hike!