Our gaming adventures
Our gaming adventures
What We’ve Been Playing: Sports, More Sports, and Sports
Nintendo Switch Sports, Switch
My daughter calls this game Wii Sports, and I can never remember the actual name. So Wii Sports it is, and let me tell you, it devoured our whole weekend once again.
Whenever I jump into this game, I can’t help but marvel at the backgrounds. They do such a great job of selling the fiction of a perfect holiday destination. The coffee shops! The bookcases! The bicycles hanging on the walls, the tiny cafes set up in shipping containers! It’s all so charming.
But what I’ve noticed now that my daughter wants to play every weekend is how addictive the whole thing is. The sports themselves are quick and fast-paced. The sword one! Badders! A quick Tennis match! You can be done in five minutes tops most of the time. And because the games are so quick, you’re likely to be drawn back in again. Just one more. Last one. Okay, a decider.
This is why the game eats up so much of our time. It promises to be short, over in a few minutes. And then hours later you realize the afternoon has vanished. What a game.
Chris Donlan
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Coffee Golf, iOS
I’m an absolute sucker for games that become rituals. The daily Sudoku, the early Monday glance at the Guardian Cryptic (on Mondays it’s generally a bit kinder to the less skilled). And now there’s Coffee Golf on iOS, which popped up a few weeks back. Let me tell you, I’m hooked. It’s fantastic. It’s become my new ritual.
Coffee Golf offers you five holes of golf to play each day, all connected on a single landmass. You only need to choose from three clubs – a driver, a wedge, and a putter.
The real challenge comes from linking the holes together. You might sink an easy hole, but what matters is how you navigate the course. If you get one hole in two shots but then take five shots to get to the next hole, that’s not quite the victory it seemed to be.
I’m still discovering the intricacies of this game, as well as realizing just how crucial the wedge is in getting you where you need to be. It’s great for taking the ball over a plateau and then making sure it doesn’t travel too far. A bit like, you know, a wedge.
And underneath the rituals, Coffee Golf is just a lovely game of golf. It boasts beautiful courses and clever, intuitive controls. If you have five minutes free each day, give it a try.
Chris Donlan
Football Manager, PC
In a way, I’ve always been playing Football Manager – or more accurately, I am constantly playing Football Manager. So for me, the question of what I’ve been playing is normally more like: yeah, but what else? In this case, not much. FM is my go-to game, where I can log in and play for 10 minutes or 10 hours, depending on life circumstances and maybe my mental state. It’s a game that largely takes place in your head, much like a crossword or chess.
Right now, it’s January 2024, about 20 months into my reign as manager of Manchester United (I’ve done some small-town local club saves, but “fixing the big broken club you support” will always be my main objective because the club I support is always broken). I’m facing a dilemma: Luke Shaw has only 6 months left on his contract, is approaching 29, and despite being one of the better left-backs in the game, he has a weirdly low Determination stat, which means he’s also kind of a jerk this year. He wants to leave and is refusing to sign a new contract, and honestly, I’m kind of fine with that. Alessandro Bastoni, the exceptional young Inter centre-back and the ideal replacement – since I could move Lisandro Martinez to left back – has become available for a ridiculously low fee. The problem is, he’s attracting interest from other clubs too, because he is absolutely brilliant. And after a gigantic summer window fire sale, I have no money left. So now I’m desperately trying to sell fifth-choice centre back Victor Lindelöf and any good-but-not-great academy player I can find at short notice. And they’re being bought. And then they’re… rejecting the contracts from the other, smaller teams that I’ve agreed to sell them to.
Basically, I’m stuck, as I always am with this game. But just a few more weeks of playing it in my head, and I’m sure I’ll figure it out.
Chris Tapsell
Welcome back to our regular feature where we write a little bit about some of the games we’ve found ourselves playing over the last few days. This time: sports, more sports, and sports.
If you fancy catching up on some of the older editions of What We’ve Been Playing, here’s our archive.