Windjammers is the most fun sports game ever made. Scratch that, Windjammers might be one of the single most fun video games on this planet. Allow me to indulge. The year is 1997. On a family trip, we reside in the Embassy Hotel & Suites in San Antonio, Texas for 7 days. Near the pool is a modest game corner that features some arcade cabinets, Silent Scope, Time Crisis, two pinball tables, and a Neo Geo arcade unit that contained six games. The games were World Heroes 2 Jet, Samurai Shodown II, Metal Slug, Blazing Star, Fatal Fury Special, and Windjammers. A huge fan of fighting games and of the Neo Geo brand, I naturally gravitated towards Fatal Fury. However, me and my brothers decided to give Windjammers a try. Suffice to say, while in a luxurious hotel with fantastic accommodations, in a span of that week, we probably spent 80% in that game room playing Windjammers. 

So what is Windjammers? It's essentially Pong on steroids, and if those steroids took Bane's Venom, because regular steroids can't contain its monstrosity. Taking place on various sized courts with different visual themes, you can select between six different athletes, each with attributes unique to themselves when it comes to size, speed, and special attack power. The shoot disc can be thrown in eight different directions and the trajectory can be altered with the control stick/d-pad. Land the disc in the different colored targets behind your opponent to score points, ultimately winning sets. There's such a fantastic meta in Windjammers that involves a great deal of offensive and defensive strategies. With timing, shots can be deflected in the air, possibly launching a powerful attack that can be very difficult to stop. Fire the disc off of barriers to throw your opponent off. I was always a Mita player.

What I love about this style of selection as opposed to legit simulation sports games is the variables can be more suited to your method of play. Each of the six players range in the aforementioned feats provided, but you won't feel overmatched right out the gate. No athlete is technically BETTER than another, it's more about how you use what they can do to your advantage. This method of game design I find much more suitable than, say, NBA 2K20 or a Madden game, where the base stats of each player and their rating plays a great part in determining the quality of your output. That might be a long-handed way of saying I suck at actual sports games, that's because I do and I'm making an excuse for it.

The sprites boast great animation and colors. The Neo Geo hardware produced some of the most high quality pixels of the era with seldom and screen tearing or slowdown, and Windjammers is treat to the eyes. I feel that given how demanding the specs were, this is probably why there were no efforts to port it to the home consoles at the time (I feel I can say that about so many Neo Geo games like Savage Reign or the Double Dragon fighting game). Though the view is exclusively overhead, the amazing hulking physiques on characters like Wessel and Scott don't go unnoticed. 

Windjammers is something I can play forever, which is remarkable. For a game that I only briefly played when I was younger, it really left a long-lasting impact on me and I've talked about it for years. The hopes that it would come to one of the several Neo Geo plug-n-play machines released over the years is all I had hinged on getting a legitimate distribution of it. It didn't help matters that SNK teetered on going completely out of business, leaving this title locked away in time. This recent generation was salvaged for me when Windjammers found a digital release in 2017. Sure, there a lot of good game that have come out in the last four years, but I got to play Windjammers legally for the first time in 20 years, and the rest of the world had a change to experience it. Dotemu intends to release a long awaited sequel, and it's one of the few things that I'm genuinely giddy about looking forward to.