Consider the average professional athlete. If they're not up at five o'clock in the morning, going for long runs in a miserable, raining, foggy dawn, they're drinking raw eggs or stuffing themselves full of 'performance' pills, hoping they won't show up in the dreaded tests. Why put yourself through the proverbial tread-mill like that when you can take up the armchair version of sports, the virtual variety?

Pretty much every base is covered within the genre on the PC, although obviously some are better covered than others. Football games are lager-swillingly popular, as are golf affairs, and there are a Hell of a lot of American 'so-called' sports. Y'know, the one's they are world champions at, in every sense except geographically.

The popularity of American sports is due to the fact that most PC game developers are US based, and with big names like EA Sports knocking out US football, basketball, baseball and ice hockey games every year like clockwork, there's no escaping the loud world of the Yankee athletes. All these EA Sports games are class efforts though, no arguments.

If you're after a top footy knockabout, then the FIFA franchise ('97, '98, '99, 2000, etc.) from EA is a corking through-ball of a game, while the big golf games are the Links series, and the Tiger Woods licence from... wait for it... EA Sports. Basically EA don't put a foot wrong when it comes to the sports stuff.

Whatever you're looking for though, it's out there, from fishing to snooker, pool to tennis, cricket to rugby; there's a sports sim for all seasons. Naturally, in a market where the fans will buy, there are some cynical cash-ins, but surprisingly enough most sports games are of a fair pedigree these days. However, there are certainly some names to steer clear of, including the Actua Soccer series, and anything with the either the word Deer or Hunter in the title (if you can call that a sport).