Sports games for the DS?

April 13, 2010 7:49 PM

What are the best sports games for the Nintendo DS or Game Boy Advance?

I just got Baseball Advance to play on my DS and love it. Can you recommend any other fun games? Any sports are fine, as long as the game is fun?

posted by reenum to technology (4 answers total)

I liked Mario Golf and Mario Tennis on the GBA. They rank highly on metacritic (unrelated to metafilter). The GBA Tony Hawk games are highly rated mainly because they somehow crammed polygonal processing into that tiny ARM chip.

Unfortunately for you, there are no DS versions of Mario Tennis / Golf. They tried 3-on-3 hoops and decided the poor ratings and sales were a bad omen I guess. I can't recall any sports games I would recommend on the DS, but then again I'm not the sort of person who focuses soley on sports games.
posted by pwnguin at 8:48 PM on April 13, 2010

Seconding Metacritic for questions like these.

Top DS sports games

Top GBA sports games
posted by Mwongozi at 4:16 AM on April 14, 2010

Strongly seconding Mario Golf. Tecmo Bowl Kickoff is fun, if you like Tecmo Bowl games anyway. Generally speaking, cartoony works better on a handheld than realistic.

And I think gamerankings is better than Metacritic, video-game-wise anyway.

It's worth mentioning, I think, that handheld sports games are kinda graded on a curve--the screens in the devices aren't always very good, which can be a big problem for sports games. Like pwnguin says about Tony Hawk, you don't play Madden on a Gameboy and expect anything near the console experience.
posted by box at 5:37 AM on April 14, 2010

The Mario Winter Olympics is fun on DS. I think there's a Summer one too.
posted by sageleaf at 3:53 PM on April 17, 2010