Backyard Sports
Score: 80% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Brighter Child Canada Developer: Humongous Games Media: CD/2 Players: 1 Genre: Sports/ Family
Graphics & Sound: Backyard Sports takes two of the more popular games from the Backyard series from ATARI and packages them together in one family, fun-filled boxed set. Both Backyard Basketball and Backyard Football give you control of large, colorful kids that will race up and down the court or field in a very nice child-friendly style that looks like it belongs on TV. Since each of the characters is supposed to represent a child version of a pro player, each team sports the true-to-life colors and the number associated with each person matches his real-world counterpart. The games' music is energetic and really helps to pull you into the sport. Other effects that help to get you into the game and really add to the overall feel for the game are elements like crowds and the various weather conditions.
Gameplay: Backyard Sports gives your children the chance to play two of the more popular kid-friendly sports games to come out for a long time. Both Backyard Basketball and Backyard Football have a gameplay style that makes it easy for kids of all ages to do what other games can make complicated and overwhelming. Both Backyard games let you pick your team for either a single quick game or for an entire season. The team members you get to choose from fall into two categories; kid-versions of pro athletes and "backyard kids" who each have their own strengths and weaknesses. Both games have many of the features found in their console big brothers. For example, in Football you can play in a variety of different weather conditions and when a player sneaks his way into the end zone, he typically does a victory dance. Though these features aren't as impressive as their big brother versions, they are just right for the game's target audience.
Difficulty: Both of the games in Backyard Sports have about average difficulty settings. It should be pretty easy for a determined young one to make progress in the Season Mode or win a quick single game. What really helps the game's ease of use is its mouse-based interaction system, simply point and click. The score card system also makes it quick and easy for you to keep track of how well you are doing throughout the seasons.
Game Mechanics: Backyard Sports's point-and-click system makes it easy for any young gamer to control his or her players on the field and court. In order to pass to another player, just click on that team member. Want to shoot the goal, click the basket. It's the user interface like this that makes these games (as opposed to games like Madden or NBA) more accessible to the kiddie gamers. Backyard Sports and its two activity books will provide hours of entertainment to any younger child in the family and it will help to promote a health dose of competitiveness without the graphic violence that most parents worry about in more advanced video games.
-J.R. Nip, GameVortex Communications AKA Chris Meyer
Minimum System Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/2000, Pentium 166MHz or higher (233 recommended), 32 MB RAM, 4 MB Free Hard Drive space, 4x Speed CD-ROM, 1 MB Windows compatible SVGA video card, DirectX 8.0 or greater   Test System: Windows XP Professional Ed., AMD Athlon XP 2400+ 2GHz, 2 GB RAM, DVD-RW, Radeon 9800 Pro, DirectX 9.0c
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