My History of Videogame Baseball (part one)

http://www.sportsprocentral.com/2008/05/11/my-history-of-videogame-baseball/

A few months ago, I posted My History of Videogame Hockey. I played good games, so-so games and outright trash. As Butthead said in one episode “Fecal Matter. Huh-huh-huh”. Now it’s baseball’s turn.

I’m not a baseball fan as much as as a hockey fan, but I still used to buy them with my brothers. But now? Nope. Last baseball game I bought was MLB The Show 07 for PS2 two years ago. Fantastic game, but as a 360 gamer,T2’s license locked out third party games. So no EA MVP for me. Never played them, but heard they were quite good. T2’s MLB 2k series seem to be sewage. For all the EA bashing, at least their sports games are getting better. 2k’s sports are getting worse. Well, here we go……….

I remember those old George Plimpton ads making fun of Atari 2600 games. It was so true that Intellivision games were 10x better, but with no arcade games, Intelly lost in market share and number of games. However, Intell’s baseball games were great. Look at that top pic. That’s MLB from around 1979. A full field of 9 players, controllable pitches, bunting, HRs, a 9 inning game with extra innings, steals. Gameplay was smooth and responsive. The game was pure skill. Hitting was based on timing. Hit it early and you pull the ball. Hit it late, and it goes to the opposite field. Key downfalls was that the outfield was too small, there was no height to the ball, only right handed pitchers and hitters and any ball hitting the border was luck if it was declared a homer… you could even bunt a HR! But you gotta remember, two good gamers would never let that happen. A fantastic start to videogame baseball. MLB gets a B-

Around 1983 came another baseball game. Graphics were almost the same except for a rounded brown infield and a sliding animation. Yes, sliding into bases was introduced. How did this game fare vs. the old one? Much better. Visuals and sound were the same, but players could slide into base, balls hit by the batter now had height! Yup. Fly balls, grounders, no more bunted HRs. You even had a button for hitting ground balls, which were perfect for getting the guy on third home to score. The field was also expanded vertically about 2 inches off the screen so the outfield was bigger. Balls had to be crunched high and hard over an invisible boundary for it to be a homer, or else it would hit a wall and bounce down. And talk about customizing, you could reposition players. I always moved the third baseman closer. And best of all? CPU AI! You could play 1-player, but don’t bother. The AI was stupid as hell. An infant could fucking beat it. Why bother adding it? Still, a better game than the original. World Championship Baseball gets a B+

One of my older bros bought the ECS system with all 6 games for cheap. Only 1 game was good. In fact, it was very good. It was called Mind Strike. How was World Series MLB? Kinda crap. The ECS had more ram or something and it showed. Graphics were a bit better, but most importantly, it allowed a 3D view and a multiple cameras on screen for showing base runners. Truly revolutionary. The game had phony players with stats and ratings and if hooked up to Intellivoice, had some basic play-by-play. I never heard it, but that’s what I read. Gameplay was horrible. The game played so slow, balls hit to the outfield were uncatchable, since the ball flew at mach speed and there was no ball marker. Outfielders ran around 2 mph. HRs could only be hit near the corners, as CF and the gaps were too far. The game did have multiple camera angles. Infield hits panned a realistic shot like TV, while balls to outfield had it’s own view. A game probably took over an hour to play. No thanks. Good try, but gameplay counts. WSMLB gets a C-

Here’s 3 more games I played on Apple. Only one of them was good. Guess which? The one with the good graphics? Yup. Microleague Baseball was pure sim. A sign of the times when Apple/PC games couldn’t handle any fast-paced games. Press the Enter key and the next 2 minutes of action play for you. Microleague had decent graphics, but were extremely grainy and the players had the worst animations ever. The sprites were so small, they looked like flecks of dust. The game came with world series winning teams I think, so there was no league action or anything like that. I always took the AL Greats and plastered every normal team by double digit runs. There were horrible programming quirks you’d think a sim game wouldn’t have. For example, if you had men on the corners, you press 4 no matter what. That was a hit and run play. Either your guy on first gets to second, since the catcher holds the ball, or you do a double steal and score a run. The game didn’t have a pre-programmed play for either runner to get out. Also, the game did not have proper physics, so even when a player was clearly safe, the game would call him out. You could always tell right away if the player will reach base. Either the batter runs at 1,000 mph to first or an second or third basemen would run to their base. For example, if you hit the ball and the third basemen runs to his base, it meant the ball would be a triple. A few times, I had the catcher run to the plate, meaning it was an in the park homer opportunity. Both times it was, though the catcher caught the balls as the runner was rounding third! On the plus side, the game had some canned play-by-play via text which I’d never seen before. First time I ever saw the term “Texas leaguer”. I guess sim players loved it, not me. Totally canned gameplay. Microleague gets a D

Next is another sim, but turn back the graphics to Pong quality. We’re talking SSI’s Computer Baseball. I didn’t play it much, but one of my bro’s loved it. Like all PC games back then, there was no action. The graphics were, white, black and green. There was zero movement in the game except for a 1 pixel ball. Fielders didn’t move, runners didn’t run and base runners were represented by a number, which told what speed he was. The game had heavy stats and full editing. But moronic AI. The game was all stat based, but had lot of quirks. “9? runners were virtually guaranteed a steal, even third base. A player that did not hit a homer could not hit one no matter what. Relievers needed time to warm up, so a way to screw up the CPU’s bullpen was to constantly walk to the mound when you were fielding. This would overkill their reliever and make him tired by the time the comp put him in. Other graphical quirks included: pitches to the plate that were quick was either a strikeout or walk, medium released pitches were outs, and a pitch that seemed delayed moving to the plate was a base hit. That killed the drama, since you knew what would happen (as if this game had excitement to begin with). I guess the program needed time to calculate or something. Since the game was 100% stat based, my bro never tried out the situation I proposed…. edit some player stats. Make a batters career stats 1/1 with 1 HR. Then make a pitcher with 1/3 or an inning pitched with 1 strikeout. What would happen? Who knows. Probably crash the game. SSI was notorious for bugs. We had other games of theirs and any weird stat issues would create overflow errors and such. Yawnful game, but props for such heavy stats. SSI gets a D too

Around 1985 came another baseball game. A nice pirated floppy that came in a pink sleeve. Hardball! Such a great game. Graphics were phenomenal for the time. It was one of the first Apple games that took a while to load at the title screen. And because it was reflex based, I could finally use a joystick to play. Smooth, fast and took skill to hit the ball. Like Intelly’s games, you could pull the ball and purposely aim the bat to hit where you want. Didn’t keep stats and player stats didn’t seem to affect player performance one bit. Players had SB stats, but they all ran the same. Pitching was cool. Pick among different pitches and aim where you wanted. A precursor to modern aiming. Screwballs were impossible to hit! When you look at the game, it has barebone stats, but it was all gameplay. The CPU was good and didn’t seem to cheat. Many quirks though. When batting, always aim low. This made your guy swing with an uppercut where the ball floated through the air oddly. Homers slowly sailed over the fence. Much more effective than swinging normal. If it wasn’t a homer, the ball would often be hit high into the air and drop for a hit. Downsides, baserunners couldn’t run back and you could always trick the CPU to run home on a sac fly, where your LF/RF would gun a strike to the catcher for an out. Stealing bases was impossible. On the plus side, games went by quickly. Maybe 20 minutes tops as strikeouts were common. Good game. Hardball scores a B+

More later this week gamers! Part 2 will be NES and Genesis!