SPORTS/DRIVING GAME OF THE YEAR: Split/Second

The flu interrupted my ongoing series about the Games 100 issue, which is an annual supplement in Games Magazine dedicated to the best games in any given year.  The first two entries were on Action Game of the Year and Strategy Game of the Year.

Sports and Driving are two genres that leave me cold, so I usually rely on my crack team of advisors, led by Lawyer to the Stars Eric Neigher, to steer me right. You can tell I really respect sports and racing games, because I shoved them into a single category and limited them to 10 or fewer titles per year. 

The reason for this is simple: they are almost always repetitious iterations of previous games with annual changes that are of interest only to people who follow this sort of thing religiously. I've worked on this guide for years, and I have run out of interesting ways to say that Madden Umpteen-Umpty-Ump has new rosters, slightly improved graphics, and a fresh control system that allows the midline field rule to be applied to the puck while in motion, or whatever it is these people do in between grunting and sweating.

As is now probably obvious, I know nothing about sports. I cannot think of an area of popular passion that is of less interest to me, other than Lady Gaga's wardrobe, or perhaps that new band you like, the one with that video. The only exception, oddly enough, is golf, which I know pretty well and covered from a gaming perspective for many years. Heck, I even wrote a museum exhibit about golf sims for the World Golf Hall of Fame. Since I understand that golf is considered the most unwatchable game on broadcast television, I'm sure this says something awful about my peculiar psyche. I just don't know what. 

On the positive side, it means I've had tea in the private dining room at Royal St. Andrews--the one overlooking the first hole--and actually touched Sean Connery's locker. (His golf locker. Man, you people have filthy minds.)

But I digress.

This year we rolled out the usual allotment of notices for NFL, MLB, UCF, MILF, and whatever other annual $60 patches made the cut. We considered the professional sports field quite seriously ... and then gave award to Split/Second, a driving game in which an airplane lands on your car while your incredible drifting skillz make you so powerful you can literally make the track explode.  

Top that, Madden.