 A few weeks ago on Twitter I made a dumb joke about a potential spinoff of awesome games done quick, referring to it as mediocre at best games done excruciatingly long, citing an example of playing a game like Bulls vs. Blazers a really early EA NBA title and trying to score 50 points with Lakers center Vladi Divak, who might be the slowest player in any game ever. Well, Travis Holman responded saying he was up for that challenge, and yeah, he pulled it off, he scored 50 points. And the first half! For some reason this got me thinking about overpowered athletes in video games, like damn, if you can score 50 with Vladi Frickin' Divak in one half, you could probably score something like 200 points with Michael Jordan. So just for fun, I set out to find out who the most overpowered video game athletes were back in the 16-bit era. Of course, the most famous example of all time in any video game ever is Bo Jackson, in both the original Tecmo Bowl and its follow-up Tecmo Super Bowl, both on NES. Bo is completely unstoppable. He was faster than anyone else in the game. He broke every tackle. It was so ridiculous that you could seriously just take the ball with Bo and run around the entire field until time ran out in that quarter before you could waltz into the endzone. It's absurd. I don't think anyone's gonna beat that, but I did manage to find plenty in the Super Nintendo catalog and Sega Genesis catalogs alone that are worth pointing out. Now, I know sports games aren't everyone's cup of tea, but they're really not all that much different from any other game in that it's just fun to be overpowered as hell, regardless of what kind of game you're playing, whether it's as a fully powered X in Mega Man X or Chrono-crushing goblins with Luminaire when you start a new game with New Game Plus, or one of my favorite examples, playing as Hakim Elijuan on the Houston Rockets in NBA Live 96. No power-ups needed here. This dude is so ridiculously good. He makes between 85% and 90% of his shots, as long as you're shooting inside the three-point line. And even better, if you're running toward the basket holding the R button, just press A anytime you're anywhere inside the free-throw line, and you will dunk over anybody that's in your way. It's fantastic. Way back in 2009, I was playing an NBA Finals game with Houston, and I said, screw it, let's see how many points I can score with Elijuan in 5-minute quarters, and I managed 118 points. In fact, I think it's possible to average over 100 points per game with this dude. I wanted to see how many points I could score with Elijuan in 12-minute quarters, and it ended up being 237 points on 117 of 131 shooting. Just ridiculous. Eat some of that, Wilt Chamberlain. And yeah, I know Michael Jordan is technically in the NBA Live games, usually as like roster 82 or something like that, but you know what, Elijuan is just as good as he is in the NBA Live series, if not better. Of course, since this is a sports game video that gives me an excuse to once again talk about Ken Griffey Jr. presents Major League Baseball. Now, I've managed to get a few people interested in this game over the years, and some people come back to me and say, hey, I keep losing. Any time I make contact, it's an out. What am I doing wrong? Well, for starters, you should probably pick the best possible team to play as, like the defending world champions at the time, the Toronto Blue Jays. Their leadoff guy is only the best leadoff guy in baseball history, Ricky Henderson, and not only is he a great hitter, he is so much faster than anyone else in the game that he can practically steal any base at any time. I mean, that should have been a single right there, but he easily stretched it to a double no problem. Plus, they've got guys like Hall of Famers, Roberto Alomar and Paul Molliter, that year's batting champion, John Olerud, World Series hero, Joe Carter, on and on. In this case, it's not a player that's overpowered. It's an entire lineup. All of these guys can hit the cover off the ball. I mean, look at this, it's the bottom of the third, and I'm already up 14-nothing with 17 hits. So if you're struggling with hitting in Griffey baseball, try hitting with the Blue Jays. Or, you know, you could just play as the Mariners, play as Griffey and smash the Bejesus out of the ball every time he's up. That works too. One of my personal favorite overpowered players in sports games is Barry Sanders, mostly because this dude basically played football like it actually was a video game. How can you possibly encapsulate what this dude was capable of on the football field in a game? Well, by making him way faster than everyone else, of course. No, he can't break tackles like Bo Jackson can in Tecmo Bowl, but it's still fun to run a simple toss play in any Madden, SNES, or Genesis game, and watch the dude take off. They're my favorite, a swing pass to the open field and let them run past the defense like they're standing still. I also want to give a special shout out to an underappreciated video game football player and kick returner, Mel Gray, also for the Detroit Lions. This is another guy that's ridiculously fast to the point that he can practically run circles around defenders, particularly in Madden 93. So yeah, this sentence sounds strange on the surface, but you can't go wrong picking the Detroit Lions when it comes to retro football games. Sticking with football, I have to mention Mutant League football for Sega Genesis and Bones Jackson, an obvious play on Bo Jackson, and he plays for the Midway Monsters and just like his namesake, this dude is just not even fair. He's faster than everyone. It takes like three defenders to bring him down. When I did a video on the Mutant League games, I got a few comments saying that the Midway Monsters were off limits when playing two player versus. Bones Jackson was just that overpowered. In fact, he was so strong, Sega even carried him over to Mutant League Hockey and yep, he's impossible to take down in that game too. If there's ever a sports video game athlete Hall of Fame, Bones Jackson is a no doubt first ballot Hall of Famer. Sticking with hockey, I also have to pay my respects to NHL 94, in particular on Sega Genesis, and for me, one player stands out above the rest and that's Jeremy Ronek, number 27 for the Chicago Blackhawks. Yeah, I hate the Blackhawks, but Ronek is the perfect combination of strength and speed. He's just about impossible for just one guy to bring down and when he has the puck, he's got enough quickness to get past any goaltender in the game. In fact, Chicago is arguably the most overpowered team in the game, since they have goaltender Eddie Belfort who's rated at 98 and he's got some high-quality complementary players like Chris Chelyos and Steve Larmer. If you're looking for speed and finesse in NHL 94, pick the Winnipeg Jets and number 13, Timo Salane. His teammates aren't as strong, but damn, if Salane isn't just unstoppable, you can easily get like 10 or 12 shots per period with this dude. If you want more info on player ratings, check out NHL94.com, it's the perfect resource for anything related to this game. There's one player in the Super Nintendo game, NCAA basketball. I discovered almost by accident when I was a kid and yeah, I know this game isn't that great, but I just love this Davison dude on North Carolina. He's a power forward, but he's seriously like the white Steph Curry. Once he gets going, he can hit a shot from anywhere on the court. It's just ridiculous. I once managed to score 100 points with this guy, which is really hard to do in this game since fatigue becomes a factor. So anytime UNC was on defense, I take him out of the game and put him back in once the possession was over just to try and keep him fresh. I swear he must have hit like 33 pointers. And yeah, I know there's a couple guys in this game that are like this, like Bright on Duke for instance, but for me, nobody touches Davison. Last but not least, I have to mention NBA Jam Tournament Edition and maybe the most overpowered video game athlete ever, Crunch the Timberwolves mascot. Okay, maybe not, but still, any of the secret characters in this game are practically maxed out with their stats, and that includes everyone from DJ Jazzy Jeff to the Fresh Prince to Bill and Hillary Clinton, Prince Charles, Frank Thomas, Heavy D, Benny the Bull. There's over 30 hidden characters here, and they're all super fun to play as because their stats are insane. So they can dunk from anywhere inside the three point line and they can hit threes and they can steal with ease. Plus the codes are super easy to implement. So next time you play this one, do yourself a favor and try it out with one of these ridiculous characters. All right, that's all for now. I wanna thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.