[Review] Accolade Sports Collection

Apart from a few qualitty of life updates there’s not much extra to be found in this collection

Remember when we used to rent games on the weekend? Remmber the sports games? We never owned a single one of these but we remember playing them. Now, how about a collection of those strictly rented sports games that we never actually owned but remember playing? That’s the gist of the Accolade Sports Collection that was just recently released by QUByte and Atari.

The games in this collection may not be the most fondly remembered, since they tended to appear in the $2 bin, but they were played by us at some point. This is exactly what the box reads, in that it’s a collection of five Accolade Sports games: Hardball, Hardball 2, Winter Games, Summer Games, and Hoops, Shut Up and Jam — the generic scrubbed version of Barkley Shut Up and Jam. But, they’ve done very little to update anything within them.

These games all have charm in their own ways, and try their best to be reflective of the sports, but they’re also very simple. Just hold a button to charge something and then let go. It could be a pass or a jump, or shooting an arrow (the archery game within Summer Games was the first thing I tried when I booted this up). They were never meant to be challenging, just to give us another way to play these sports.

The real shame is that this collection is pretty bare-boned in its presentation. There are CRT filters and borders, but no art, no videos, and no history about these; this is just a collection of these games, just a bundle, and nothing else. In an era where the words “collection” mean something a little more, this doesn’t go very far. It’s really just for the folk who grew up with these games and no one else, and no one is going to be turned into a fan after getting it.

It’s just for us 80s and 90s sickos.

This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It first appeared on The SideQuest Live for April 22, 2025.