#29: Super Baseball Simulator 1000

One thousand or a really precise one?

Super Baseball Simulator 1000 is certainly one of the games I played the most on the SNES as a kid. It had everything a baseball game needed to have in order to keep my interest for a long stretch of time. Would it still hold some of that luster 21 years later?

165 games is a lot of games!

The first thing the game has going for it is the ability to actually play a full baseball season. The game accurately tracks every at bat that happens in the game and keeps hitting and pitching statistics for every player on every team throughout the season. I didn't actually like playing baseball all that much as a kid but I loved baseball stats. I used to keep score for games I'd watch on tv and wrote a spreadsheet to track my house league team's stats using whatever spreadsheet software it was that came with GEOS on the Commodore 64. So for the game to keep data over almost 500 games for a season was pretty awesome for me.

Mercy ruled!

But as I said, I didn't really like playing baseball... This game would let you simulate games you weren't playing which was nice. But on top of that you had the option to not really play baseball. You could play super enhanced baseball. In the field you'd have a jump/dive button and a super jump/dive button so you could jump to the roof of the stadium to catch a home run if you timed it right. You could slide all the way from one side of the field to another. Hit X before getting the ball to charge up a super throw that would get to the base fast. Hit Y before getting the ball to power up your glove allowing you to actually catch some of the super hits. Every batter had a special hit they could use like turning the ball into an exploding bomb that stunned whoever it hit or turning the ball invisible or reversing the controls of the defender so up was down and left was right. Pitchers had 4 super pitches they could choose from with things ranging from the iron ball that would frequently break bats to the SSFB (Super Super Fast Ball) that went, as advertised, really freaking fast.

Other 'super' pitches weren't so super.

You could set up your league to allow a limited number of super moves per game. This terrible leaf pitch would cost you 4 of your quota. You could turn super moves off entirely by setting the quotas to 0. Or you could set them to unlimited and just be crazy awesome on every play. Guess what I did?

Now, the computer couldn't quite handle the concept of super moves. It wouldn't use them very well, it had no idea how to deal with some of my super moves, and it would trivialize others. For some reason the super hit which made the ball invisible was easy to deal with. I think the computer would cheat and know where the ball would land. On the other hand the super hit which made the ball's shadow invisible broke the AI. It would simply stop moving players until the ball landed. Even though it could make sense that the computer could do an ok job of working out where the ball 'should' land given that you can still see the ball itself!

The game was really easy. Back then it was really easy, now it was really easy. But I played it a lot so I guess I didn't care that it was really easy. I wasn't playing the game to win so much as to try to twink out my player stats. My lead off hitter would basically hit an inside the park homerun every at-bat. Only when the computer would randomly make an error would I get screwed (for some reason the stats engine would treat that as an at-bat but not as a hit which would lower my average). I can remember being bitter about the mercy rule which called the game after you were up by 10 if you were the home team. If you were the away team you could score as much as you wanted because theoretically they could come back in the bottom of the inning. I'd run into problems trying to have my guys show up on the stat lists because they wouldn't get enough at bats because most of them would only bat once in the first inning and then the game would get called.

That said, I think using an actual limit on super moves would make the game more strategic. Do you really want to use the super throw from the out field on this play? You can guarantee strike the other guy out by throwing 3 warp pitches in a row... In order to have a game you need some way to prevent that from happening. Gentleman's rule or by putting in a cost you can't always pay. I'm glad they built such a system into the game even if I never used it.

At any rate, I played a full 5 game season, went undefeated, and had fun. Still a good game.

Rating: A+