My History of Videogame Baseball (part two)

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Here’s part two folks. Part one of my baseball gaming was weeks ago, but being bogged down at work and hockey playoffs, I was busy. Yeah right, I was just lazy! Okay, Intellivision and Apple b-ball games were done with. Now NES and one of my most fav systems - Genesis.

First up? The worst baseball game past, present and forever future. LJN’s Major league Baseball. So bad, this is the second time I’ve written about it. There was nothing good about it. Graphics were atrocious with typical cartoony fat blobs and crowd noise was ear bleeding static. Sure it was 8-bit NES, so if gameplay rocked, visuals and audio would be forgiven right? Too bad the game mechanics were even worse. Too many homers, it was impossible to strikeout the CPU, fielders threw the ball sometimes fast, sometime slow, so infield hits happened half the time. No real players and even the player stats were inaccurate. MLB was one of the cheapest NES games I bought. Who says cheap doesn’t means bad? Obviously gamers who never played this game. I would love to do a Roman Shower on it. LJN’s MLB easily gets an F-

Months later, I got Jaleco’s Bases Loaded after selling LJN’s for $20. I remember seeing a blurb on the box saying it was 2.5 megs. Whatever that meant, but it sounded good. Hokey marketing? Sure, but it worked and BL was awesome. No real teams, no real players, not even a 162 sked I don’t think. Some reason I remember it being 140 games??? No stat tracking either. The game gets black marks for all those points and the fact infielders threw the ball amazingly fast so infield hits are almost impossible. Bases Loaded sounds like it’ll get a C or D right? Nope. Everything else was great. Graphics, various batting and pitching styles. Lefties on the mound had the view reversed, good physics, some digitized speech from the ump. And base clearing brawls.!Nail a guy too many times and not only does the batter say “you bum”, but a cinematic screen comes on with players flailing. I think I only got it to work once. The game was fast and responsive unlike LJN’s steaming pile, but one quirk I noticed was that a batter was as good as his stance. Certain batting stances seemed to hit balls better. Player names were limited to 5-6 letters and I’ll always remember my team having a guy named “Bacon”. Great ware. My bro who loved stat based Apple games even loved BL. Game gets a solid B….. One thing I noticed when I found the box image is that a Free Wilson Poster was suppose to be included. That was bull. Never got it.

I never owned Tommy Lasorda, but borrowed off a guy and played it quite a bit. A decent arcadey game, but nothing special. Even the graphics weren’t that good. The batter/pitcher view was much better than any NES game, but the fielding screen could have been done on NES. The menu screens were ugly as well. Fake teams and players again. As much as SSI Baseball was junk, it did have real stats and came out 6-7 years earlier! The game moved along swiftly as strikeouts were common and 99% of runs were scored on homers. There were groundball singles (could not be fielded) and towering homers into the parking lot. Doubles and triples almost never happened due to ball physics… there were never bloopy bounces or gappers. Game had a handful of speech, like calling out the position of a fielder, which sounded good, but to cheap out, a strikeout was called by the ump as “Strike…slight pause… Out”. Tacky. And just like Bases Loaded’s dumb player names, my team had a guy named “Robot”. Good thing I didn’t buy it. Tommy Lasorda gets a C-

Wanting a good baseball game, I laid out some cash for the Genesis version of Hardball. At the time Accolade was one of those blacklisted developers as they didn’t want to become official game makers for Sega. They had some lawsuits back and forth. Who cares. That’s their problem. Yawn….. another baseball game with phony stats and teams, but I think the game did have a 162 game schedule. Graphics were pretty good and smooth flowing. Hardball played a solid game as well and the CPU didn’t cheat. A key downfall was that it was too easy to advance players as the computer was stupid. You could trick it into throwing to wrong bases and steal home at will. Runners were red, yellow and green. Green being fast. It was a guaranteed steal with a greenie. The hitting interface was responsive and homers were pretty rare, which was a first in console games. As long as you didn’t take advantage of the base running quirks, the comp gave a challenge. No automatic win. A few snippets of voice, but a definite bug I could never reproduce. One time, a batter was called out ending the inning. The ump called out “side retired” in digitized speech, but never did it say it out loud again. Just the text on screen. Weird. Not bad. Much better than the original Hardball games. B-

Around 1991-92 came a landmark game. not in visuals, gameplay or stats, but sound. The legendary Sports Talk Baseball. At the time, the number of megs in a game heavily influenced how good looking or long a game would be. Most games that were 4 megs were trash. Hike it up to 8+ megs and the game was much better. I don’t know how much memory STB had, but considering how mediocre the game played and visuals worse than TL and Hardball, no doubt the sound took it all. Real team names? Nope again. But real players with real stats, some unique batting stances… Franco and Tettleton were awesome and hulks like Canseco and McGwire were huge. Player ratings used a spiderweb approach, which was cool but confusing. A game could be finished in 15 minutes. Too many homers, player animations that looked stupid (players running looked like they were doing the splits in a 2 frame animation). Also, too many errors. Seemed like there were double plays every inning. The key feature was the play-by-play announcing. An old scruffy sounding guy had lots of lines of text. A real first for videogames. Since the game played fast, he’d often fall behind the calls and the game would force it self to chop out lines midway through a sentence to catch up. Pretty funny, but awesome. Make a great dive or jumping catch and guy would go nuts! The same guy would do Sega’s football games. Sports Talk Baseball was the pinnacle of baseball voice. In their next games, his lines would be reduced. Not a great playing game, but entertaining to listen to. C+

In last two Genesis games I played were World Series Baseball and its 95 edition. Somewhat similar games, but 95 had much better stats. This is where their sports games truly-made Genesis the game for frat boys. There was no comparison vs. Sega’s older titles. Real teams, real players, full schedule and an unbelievable batter/pitcher view that made any snobby PC game look like Atari 2600. The batter was huge and pitchers had different windups. Game played great. You could choose contact, normal or power swings. Each one reducing your batting cursor. I believe a first in baseball games. Like STB, the announcer was back, but his library of sound bites was chopped in favour of stats and graphics. In return, they overlapped a stadium announcer to queue players coming to bat. Presentation was improved as a nice grey scoreboard and interface were created.

WSB 95 was better, but I don’t remember much difference between them. The batter look better, but visuals were similar. The key difference was full stats were tracked in tons of categories and you could do a fantasy draft, which was great. The batting cursor was change to reflect each batter’s skill. A good hitting power guy would have a bigger sweet spot than a light hitter when choosing Power. Each batter’s reticule was adjusted, which was a wicked feature. And unlike WSB’s curcular aimer, 95’s resembled a bat shape - even better Homers in the game were hard to hit unless you had a player rated 8 or 9 in power. Both games get an A-