Sports

Sports is actually a crowded space, but it’s one that’s cluttered with iterated yearly bread-and-butter products that are predictable and uninteresting. There are a few novel projects going on, and these ones are worth looking at. Feel free to add things like Madden and NBA Live to the list in your mind.




1. Facebreaker
X360/PS3/Wii
EA/ EA Canada
September
Boxing is a space that EA has never been afraid to innovate it, reinventing and even retiring brands in order to keep things constantly fresh. Facebreaker’s not meant to replace Fight Night, though—just compliment it, bringing to market the first high-profile cartoon boxing game in quite some time. It’s cute, accessible, and has some extremely strange celebrity cameos. The Wii SKU is going to lead this one’s sales, being the closest thing to a casual boxing game on a console owned by a lot of Wii Boxing fans.




2. TNA iMPACT!
X360/PS3/PS2/Wii
Midway/Midway Los Angeles
September
What’s this? Competition in the licensed wrestling game space? Yes, while TNA doesn’t have much of a chance of catching up to the WWE in TV product, in terms of games the venerable Smackdown series has been floundering. That’s not to say TNA iMPACT! will surely succeed—it still has a far weaker brand associated with it, and the ever-present question of quality when it comes to unproven licensed product is there as well. Still, even just existing this game will force Smackdown to work a little bit harder. Taking 100,000 sales away from the market leader should be considered a victory in this case.




3. Skate It
Wii
EA/EA Montreal
September
The original Skate brought competition right to Activision’s overexploited Tony Hawk franchise, an incredible achievement for a new property. Skate It has a similar opportunity to become the defining title in the Wii extreme sports space. The original’s thumb flick-based trick system seems to have translated well over to gestures, and Wii Balance Board support has been added. Intuitive implementations of either control system could make this the leading skating product among young males, which could lead to sales in the high hundreds of thousands.




4. Blitz: The League II
X360/PS3
Midway/Midway
October
Blitz is doing its very best to make a name for itself as the bad boy of the football genre, and with the League II it should cement this reputation. The most brutal hits in this sequel result in cutscenes that show flesh tearing off shattered bone. The juicing system has been upgraded to give players access to a vast array of performance enhancing drug cocktails. It’s about as far away from Madden as a product could get while still remaining in the same market sector. Its predecessor moved a million, and this one probably will too.




5. Shaun White Snowboarding
Wii/X360/PS3/PS2/PSP/DS/PC
Ubisoft/Ubisoft Montreal
October
The Wii SKU is the most important one for Shaun White Snowboarding, what with the optional Wii Balance Board controls that tickled Nintendo enough to feature the game at its E3 press conference. The more cartoony art style of that game’s SKU also feels more appropriate for the license. After getting that big E3 push it would be surprising if Ubisoft didn’t market this as hard as possible—sales of 500,000 should be satisfactory, though that would put it nowhere near the majority of SSX games.