Accolade Sports Collection - A Forgettable Retro Compilation

Accolade Sports Collection – A Forgettable Retro Compilation

I’ve repeatedly thought about which games deserve a return, whether through a remake, a retro compilation, or even a remaster. Sometimes it feels like certain companies have absolutely no idea what gamers actually want.

The Accolade Sports Collection sounds like it could have been an awesome bundle of classic hits from gaming’s early days, but let’s start with a brutal question: did anyone actually ask for these games?

Hardball By Accolade, An IP To Die For?

Sure, Hardball! was a kickass franchise back in the 1980s, but even as someone who grew up during that era and loves retro gaming, a Hardball! compilation never crossed my mind. To make things even stranger, both of the first Hardball! games are included in this collection.

While I can appreciate the historical significance of the series, it feels like a very niche choice for a modern retro compilation. There are countless classic franchises that fans have been requesting for years, yet somehow we’re getting a collection centred around games that were rarely mentioned in retro gaming discussions to begin with.

Hardball Kicked Ass Back Then, Both Games Feel Very Old Now Though…

The publisher of this collection, QUByte, tries to hype things up with bold claims like “The Legend Is Reborn.” While I really wish that were true, the reality is quite different. The games feel incredibly awkward and slow to play, and in my opinion, this collection actually damages the legacy at times rather than celebrating it.

Whether these are ports or emulations, they desperately needed considerably more polishing before being released. Bringing old games back is great, but they still need to be adapted and refined enough to meet today’s expectations and standards.

The HardBall games are easily the better ones of the bunch, but sadly, that doesn’t necessarily make them good. If anything, it just highlights how poor some of the other games in this compilation are.

Street Hoops, Awesome In The 90s Perhaps, Not So Much Today…

Sidescrolling Basketball games were one of those things we didn’t get much of on the Amiga, and admittedly, it was one of the genres I always felt the machine sorely needed more of. I never really tried many of these games back in the day, and it wasn’t until the PlayStation arrived that I started to realise that quite a few of them looked much cooler than they actually played.

Street Hoops certainly looks cool, and I’m sure it was kick-ass good back then, but much like most of the games in this collection, it simply feels too janky and slow for its own good today. The imprecise controls don’t help either, especially when playing with the analogue sticks on modern consoles instead of the digital joypads and joysticks these games were originally designed around.

That said, the sprites are seriously good and there are loads of nice little details throughout. I also have a feeling the game would look a million times better on a proper CRT. CRT filters and emulation on today’s TVs and consoles can certainly help, but no matter how good they get, it’s just not quite the same thing as seeing these old games running on the displays they were designed for.

Winter Challenge, Cool Game In The Wrong Sense…

This and Summer Challenge were actually the main reasons why I asked for a review key in the first place. I’ve always loved these kinds of sports games, and while I’ve mostly preferred the summer-themed ones over the years, Winter Challenge still caught my attention and had me rather excited to give it a go.

What I didn’t see coming was just how different it would be from what I expected. At first glance, Winter Challenge looks like some sort of mixture of the classic Epyx, Tynesoft and Microids sports games from the Commodore 64 and Amiga era. Instead, what we actually got is a strange hybrid that seems to borrow bits and pieces from games like The Games: Winter Edition, Winter Challenge, Super Ski II, Winter Supersports and whatnot.

It certainly fooled me for a little while… well, at least until I actually started playing it.

The sheer amount of jank, laggy controls and generally sluggish response makes Winter Challenge extremely frustrating to play today. Nothing feels as immediate or precise as you’d expect from this type of sports game, and unfortunately, neither the graphics nor the sound do it any favours either.

I went into this one genuinely excited, but it didn’t take long before that excitement completely disappeared.

Summer Challenge or is that Summer Challenged…

Summer Challenge really shows just how bad these types of games can be when they’re not made by the likes of Epyx, Creative Assembly, Code Monkeys, Westwood and the other developers who managed to create absolute monster hits in this genre.

Summer Challenge was something I genuinely wanted to like. As I’ve mentioned many times before, I absolutely love these types of sports games, but much like Winter Challenge, this one struggles with even the most basic stuff. Events that you’d think would be almost impossible to mess up become borderline unplayable, once again largely because of the controls. Everything feels imprecise, laggy and, at times, downright unfair.

Pole vaulting doesn’t feel skill-based at all; it feels more like luck. Javelin, which is normally one of my most-played events in games like this, is far too imprecise, with both the movement and aiming feeling like an afterthought. The frame rate is laughable at best, and sadly, things don’t exactly improve when you move on to the other events either.

I did manage to beat a few scores and pick up a bunch of trophies along the way, but honestly, the trophy list is probably the best thing about the entire game.

The second-best thing?

The game-selection menu.

Yeah… that pretty much says it all.

Summary, verdict and whatnot…

I honestly have no idea why an Accolade logo has been slapped onto these games, and I haven’t been able to find much information about their origins either. I don’t know whether they were originally Mega Drive, SNES or even PC games, but one thing I can say with certainty from playing them is that these most definitely do NOT feel like Amiga or Commodore 64 ports or conversions.

The horrible frame rate is just the beginning of the problems. The graphics don’t translate particularly well to modern OLED, LED or LCD displays, especially once you start blowing them up on 46-inch screens and beyond. Everything just feels rough, dated and completely out of place on a modern setup.

Sadly, the problems go far beyond the visuals. These games feel like an unplayable mess at times, performing badly almost from the second you load them up. Sluggish controls, poor responsiveness and an awful frame rate combine to suck nearly all the enjoyment out of the experience.

What a major turnoff this turned out to be. I went into this collection genuinely excited to revisit this style of classic sports game, so to come away feeling this disappointed is absolutely gutting.

” Should You Buy? – No, absolutely not, this is as far out to the crap box you can get without putting it in a AI SLOP ware box “.