Weird Sports Games (For the World Cup)

If you, like me, want to avoid football as much as possible over the World Cup, here’s a list of weird sports games that might hold your attention instead. This list will also apply for those people, like my own countrymen, who want to pretent there isn’t a World Cup on too.

These are games that explore sports that would be impossible, dangerous, or downright bizarre in real life. So please only place the video game versions. We won’t be held responsible when your broom doesn’t fly, or when your chainsaw cuts straight through someone.

I’m also not vouching for the quality of these games. They will not all have aged well. Maybe none of them will have aged well. But they’re weird, and that’s enough for me.

Note: These games mostly look towards the PS1/PS2 era. There are no shortage of games that could’ve appeared on this list, including the recently reviewed (and ultimately disappointing) Soccer Story.

Dead Ball Zone

Dead Ball Zone is a kind of rugby/football style game with a twist. That twist is guns, grenades and chainsaws.

And despite apparently selling pretty well, this is a title that never gets brought up. Personally, I think a few chainsaws would make the World Cup a bit more interesting.

The point being, Dead Ball Zone is a forgotten sporting gem. It probably doesn’t hold up by today’s standards, but at the time it was pretty cool. It embodies that 90s/early 2000s edginess that’d stick about for much too long.

Harry Potter: Quidditch World Cup

At the height of the Harry Potter craze, everything that could have his name slapped on was brought into shops. The Wizarding World’s sport was crying out for a video game adaption and… this was it.

No, I’m only poking fun. I loved this game as a kid, and it’s still easy to see why. It plays smoothly, it has cute graphics and it brings you more deeply into the world of Harry Potter. It’s not the deepest of sporting games, but it does what it needs to do.

Unfortunately, it does it over and over again, without much in the way of variety. There’s no story or career mode, just some training sessions and then a couple of leagues. But even jumping up from Hogwarts to the Quidditch World Cup doesn’t really change things up much.

Bonus points for the massively stereotypical special moves which have Japan kung-fu fighting.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll love it for ten matches or so and then need a break. But those ten matches will be incredible.

BMX XXX

We all saw it on video game shop shelves. I’m not sure it ever sold a single copy, but I know everybody knew what it was. BMX XXX probably isn’t World Cup worthy. It was barely even playable, but it did get a million young minds wondering just what lay behind that XXX titling.

Of course, it wasn’t how playable it was that makes this one stick out in our collective conscience. Nope.

In fact, this game nearly killed Acclaim, and when you think it through it’s obvious why. The people who thought the idea of juvenile humour and poorly drawn PS2-era boobs was worth buying a game for needed to get their mom to buy it for them. Everybody else just bought Nuts magazine. Or a proper bike game.

Still, if quirky sports games are your bag, here’s one that definitely belongs on the list.

Blitzball – Final Fantasy X

In the modern age of mobile spin-offs and GAAS madness, Blitzball would be more than it ended up being.

Which is the greatest sport mini-game of all time.

If you get far enough through Final Fantasy X to get to Luca, you know what I’m talking about. A menu-based sports game that is both endlesly frustrating and eventually rewarding that it’s just highly addictive. I’ve known people to ignore it completely. I understand it completely. But man are they missing out.

If there’s one World Cup tier game worth playing, it’s Blitzball. We’d just have to figure out the crazy underwater breathing thing first.