Editor's note: Chris hits upon one of my pet peeves in video games: Sports games are either for the casual player or the hardest of the hardcore. The middle ground no longer exists. Do you agree with Chris's observations? -Jason

I'm not a big sports guy. I've always been a poor spectator, getting antsy and changing the channel, and memories of playing school sports revolve around standing in the freezing rain holding a battered piece of wood that was supposed to be a rounders bat.

A lack of competitiveness is an issue of mine, and this is why the only athletic endeavor I'm involved in is pro wrestling, which isn't competitive in a sporting sense at all. I like to think I'm intellectually above having win/loss records being important to me in life.

You see, sports fans and athletes, you may not be aware of this, but perhaps as some form of ineffective retaliation against you for years of childhood head-flushing, nerds have been trying for some time to slander you as being not that bright. It's playground name-calling, really. You're Gridiron Jocks. Football Hooligans. Rugger Buggers. Golf, um...yeah.  

Such labels may be borne out by game purchasing choices. No doubt dubbed the "casual hardcore" by some idiot in an ill-fitting suit with "industry analyst" written on beer-mat business cards in crayon, most of the Match of the Day/SportsCenter-watching faithful only buy a handful of games a year. Are these discerning customers? Or are they the folk that're easily lead into buying NCAA Football and Madden NFL in consecutive months despite these games being nearly the bloody same? Sales of both FIFA and World Cup: South Africa in Europe will testify this isn't simply an American thing. Even Konami give it a go with the Japanese market -- Winning Eleven (Pro Evolution Soccer in the U.S.) has come in three different flavors so far this year.

Yeah, sports are stupid, and people who like them are stupid. Yet attempting to play a sports game in 2010 reveals that in actuality, sports-game fans must have brains the size of planets.

I'm no stranger to cybersports. I often keep a football (Anglo or American, take your pick) game on file for a brief multiplayer match here and there, Despite being a couple of versions behind ([sotto voce] yes, it's me that's preventing EA Sports guy Peter Moore from moving into his house made of money, and Project Ten Dollar, EA's method of reducing used sales of its games, means nothing to me. Do your worst, EA.) I've seen sports games become more and more intimidating over the years.

FIFA, not content with putting every button on the modern gamepad (clicky sticks and all) in use, has put increased importance on creating custom tactics and swapping between them on d-pad hotkeys in game in recent versions, transforming a game about kicking a ball around a field into a basic real-time strategy game.

In American football, meanwhile, players have long been charged with memorizing what giant lists of squiggly lines and arrows in virtual playbooks mean, and when EA changed things up this year to streamline the experience -- optionally, mind you -- there seemed to be an uproar from the hardcore faithful, in reviews and podcasts. Gutting the game, stripping away tactical depth -- cripes, you'd think someone was making X-com into an first-person shooter. Or something.

What really struck me about the intimidating nature of sports games like a Superman punch to the face, however, was my recent impulse purchase of UFC 2010: Undisputed recently.

Despite my professed ambivalence toward sport, I am a big fan of violence. I don't know a Hail Mary from a 4-4-2 defensive alignment, but I know a high kick from a kimura. And having liked what I played of last year's offering, I went straight into the career mode.

I can create my own guy, which is important, and then start fighting through prelims. You have to train and spar, but setting sparring to automatic only penalizes you slightly and lets you get to the fights and post match trash talking (it's new -- and good -- but they could have done more with it) quickly.

Moving up through the ranks, I get put on pay-per view and... tap out in 20 seconds. Crap. I rage quit before the autosave kicks in. Restart. I'm hanging by a thread after one round and get steamrolled in the second. What's going on? The other fights were an occasional challenge but by and large a breeze. I look at the stats. My skill parameters in most areas linger at four and five -- out of one hundred.

You see, when you spar in UFC, you get points, which you can assign to a bewildering array of areas to improve your ground game or stand-up fight (or whatever). But in trying to be an all-rounder and allocating points evenly, I was ridiculously underpowered. Worse, by letting some skills lay fallow by doing exercises to improve yet more stats, my level in those areas had actually gone down. Crap.

I start again. I come back from beneath, burn from the stern. Top gear from the rear. I pick simple opponents and earn more "cred." I spar. I gain arbitrary points and spend them in the right areas. I fight less-challenging opponents. I am ready for the Main Event? No, not yet. So I grind, and grind, more XP. I level up. Oh, crap -- I'm playing a role-playing game.

How did that happen? How did a game about something so primal as stripping to the waist and punching faces and breaking arms get bogged down in dice rolls and experience points? Moreover, how is this supposed to draw the audience who only buys a couple of games a year? How is this even fun?

Played on low difficulty settings, or with friends in exhibition modes, it seems sports games are light, casual entertainment. But in their main single-player modes, they suddenly become harder than hardcore. Why is this? I felt annoyed by UFC 2010's stat juggling in the career mode, not least because it does a terrible job of conveying play approaches and generally what you should be doing to the player -- but also by its lack of catering to me.

"If you don't like the RPG stuff," it seems to say, "it's got online, exhibitions, classic fights and tournaments. Plenty there." This is true, and it's very good, but why can't I have the emotional investment of taking my fighter through the UFC ranks, making friends and enemies along the route to glory, without becoming bogged down with the RPG stuff?

On that note, if I, a hardcore gamer, feel this way about UFC, a ton of people are out there who want to take their team to the Super Bowl or the F.A. Cup but can't be bothered to mess around with the resource management and strategy involved. Don't get me started, meanwhile, on baseball games, which seem to have required a degree in statistics to competently play for the past 15 or 20 years.

So the next time your casual gaming buddy tells you he's all done with Madden after a monster session and wants something new, maybe you're better off recommending Starcraft to the guy than Wii Sports.