Baseball, hockey, football, basketball–screw them.

What is a memorable not-quite-mainstream sports video game?  And All-Pro Curling 2009 doesn’t count.

Dave:  Must…resist…urge…to…say…Pit-Fighter.  Ah, @#$% it.  Pit-Fighter.  Competition?  Check.  Cash prizes?  Check.  Excited, engaged audiences?  Check.

Look, kids, you can keep your BMX racing or mountain bike slalom or whatever competitive venture the kids are doing these days that require tying a parachute to one’s groin–when it comes to extreme, nothing can hold a candle to the sheer, nailbiting terror of Southside Jim hefting up a motorcyle to throw in your general direction.

Pit-Fighter even has its own doping contoversies.  Can you say “Power Pill?”

D-bags.

Erich: If Dave counts Pit Fighter as a sports game, then I’ve got to go with another Genesis “classic” from our dorm room days: Skitchin’!

Skitchin' is bitchin'

Don’t remember Skitchin’? You’re probably not alone. This mid-’90s EA gem was an inline skate racer where you could grab onto the backs of cars and bikes to give yourself a speed boost—a dangerous mode of transportation called “skitching,” as in “I skitched on the back of that Geo Metro. It was rad.” While I don’t remember how “rad” the game actually was (it probably would have been better as a minigame in Back to the Future), I wasted countless collegiate hours in the heady haze in its scofflaw grip. Did I mention you could be arrested by the cops in the game? Totally awesome or subliminal social conditioning? You be the judge.

Now that's the power of love!

Adam: Okay, honestly? I had no intention of purposefully sticking to the “All Genesis All The Time” theme of today’s articles. This one comes down to happy coincidence.

I’m putting down two games of the same franchise: EA’s Mutant League Football and Mutant League Hockey. These were completely off-the-wall takes on well-established sport genres, replacing legitimate players with robots, skeletons and monsters who slay and murder their opponents to score a touchdown or a goal. In short, they were awesome.

The Raiders are wussies compared to these guys.

In Mutant League Football, a game that played very similar to Madden ’93, the field is a toxic landmine-ridden hellish landscape riddled with flaming pits, crevices and dead bodies. Opponents can bribe the ref to land their opposition penalty after penalty, until they decide to murder the ref in retribution. Footballs could be rigged with explosives, deliberately “intercepted” by another team, with messy results.

Shortly thereafter came Mutant League Hockey, which took the same mechanics and applied it to hockey. You can bribe the ref to give unnecessary penalties to the opposing team, lay land mines on the ice to blow up the forwards, exploding pucks and all manner of carnage. Angry fans will hurl weapons onto the ice for players to use.

Hooking is bad, but there is no penalty for axing.

As sports games, these were surprisingly accessible titles, based off well-established engines and utilizing similar mechanics. They took some skill (just like the originals) but the nerd factor got tempered by the inclusion of hilarious ways to overcome the limitations of sports rules. I mean, heck–if you killed or incipacitated enough of the opponent’s team players, they automatically forfited. Nobody’s going to argue that there weren’t some, ah, balance issues (especially playing against devious foes who eschewed the traditional game mechanics of football and hockey and just set out to @#$% you up).

But that’s what made them such fun games! The outlandish game mechanics are just too awesome to ignore, landing them a special place in many a zombie-loving heart. You may lose the game, but getting shoulder-checked into a landmine and exploding is really a half-victory, wouldn’t you say?

Steve: I know there isn’t a “Genesis” theme running here, but i’m gonna go with Road Rash. Not only were you racing “hot whips”, but you were tasked with beating the tar out of your opponents while racing said “whips”. That’s bad-ass.