Extra Innings (SNES / Super Famicom)

One of the things I miss most about 8 and 16-bit baseball games were how cute so many of them were.  Nowadays it's all serious business with major leaguers everywhere.  Gone are the days of the colorful uniforms, cartoony players, and cheerful background music. Extra Innings is one of those games that regularly reminds me of those times, and how much I miss them.  Interestingly, it's also a game from Sony before they came out with the PlayStation, and were making games for other systems.

Blades of Steel (NES / Famicom)

Back in the NES days there was only one choice when looking for a hockey game for the system, and, amazingly, it wasn't by EA.  The game was Blades of Steel, and it was fantastic.  Fast play, solid controls, looked pretty good, and had a really snazzing penalty shot system.  I think my friends and I tried to go to shoot outs whenever possible just to do that little bit.  A really great game when Konami was trying their hand at some hockey.

Super Spike V'Ball (NES / Famicom)

This game became quite the thing with my group of friends as a kid, though the huge push it was getting from Nintendo Power at the time may have helped with that. :p  It was quite a good game, though.  Very nice visuals for the time, responsive, simple controls, and it was actually pretty long.  Certainly one of the more popular NES sports games of its time that it would seem a lot of people today have forgotten about.