#129: Cal Ripken Jr. Baseball

Junior Baseball?

Well, it's pretty obvious what we're going to run into here. A baseball game with Cal Ripken Jr's endorsement. I'm not a terribly big fan of baseball games now, but I used to like them a lot back when I was a kid. Is this a game I would have liked back then?

FIRDY BIRD!

This game has some high points, and some low points. The high points include the really great music and sound effects. It has an organ playing a pretty good rendition of the US National Anthem, for example. And it said "Play Ball!" at the end of it just like it felt like it should. I like those little details in a game. The low points involve fake rosters (except for Cal Ripkin), horrendous pitching, and terrible fielding. The batting wasn't great either. And I can't talk about the baserunning since the only time I didn't get out was when I hit a homerun.


Watch live video from TheGreatZiggyny on Twitch

I streamed my experience playing this game. Mostly as a test of my ability to stream through an emulator, but it worked well enough I'll probably do it again next week.

Anyway... I don't think young Nick would have enjoyed this game very much at all. But it is a functional game, I have to give it that. And the sweet music is enough to earn it a plus.

Rating: D+

#104: Super Batter Up

Swing batter batter batter batter...

Super Batter Up is, unsurprisingly, a baseball game. A baseball game that was entirely new to me, even. Was it going to be good, bad, or ugly?

RICKY!

I start off and I get to pick from actual MLB teams. I took my favourite team from that era, the Oakland A's, and played against my hometown team the Toronto Blue Jays. And even 22 years later I still recognize most of the names. I didn't see any MLBPA logos or anything so I wonder if they were even allowed to do this? Anyway, it's certainly a good start to the game!

Jays win! Jays win!

I played a game and I got blown out. I simply couldn't score and the controls were clunky enough I couldn't really field well either. It has the standard baseball game problem where you control all of your players at the same time. So if you move the shortstop towards the ball but he isn't close enough to actually get to it you've also managed to move your outfielders out of position so they can't get to it either. The AI doesn't suffer from this problem so they were always able to get to my hits. The runners were so abysmally slow compared to actual baseball that even if I hit the ball into a gap I couldn't ever get a double. The AI got lots of doubles though because it would take so long for me to recover from my bad movements.

Pitching was also annoying. You had the option of throwing a ball in the dirt, but I couldn't figure out a way to see that the ball was going to be unhittable until it was too late. This meant I would sometimes strike out without having a chance to adapt. It also meant I could guaranteed strike out my opponent by just throwing balls in the dirt over and over again. I don't find that to be fun, so I didn't do it after I tested it out to verify I could.

The game does have tons of amazing bells and whistles. Toronto was the home team so it played the notes from the last line of Oh Canada! I tested again with Detroit as the home team and it played the end of The Star Spangled Banner instead. I think that's pretty awesome. It also played a lot of typical baseball game organ music during the game which was nice. It had an animation for the 7th inning stretch and played Take Me Out To The Ballgame. When a homerun was hit it animated all the guys who were on base waiting at home plate to high five the batter. Eckersley even pitched sidearm!

It felt like this was a game made by some people who loved baseball and were able to add lots of neat things in. But then they went and failed at making a core fun game. Oh well.

Rating: C-

#83: Roger Clemens' MVP Baseball

Play Ball!

This game is new to me, but I've played a lot of baseball games in my day. I didn't think I'd have much of a problem with this one. Boy, was I wrong...

Toronto Bears?!?

The first problem was a corrupted rom. It was making the annoying loud clicking sound that helped give Jack Nicklaus Golf the dreaded F- rating. On top of that most of the graphics were garbled. So I went out and got a different copy. This one had fine graphics but it still had the headache causing sound. This automatically made me unhappy, but I wanted to persevere and see what the game had to offer...

I GOT IT! (I don't got it...)

What the game had to offer is the worst fielding experience I've ever seen. Pitching is done with home plate at the bottom of the field. Fielding is done with home plate at the top of the field. The camera does an annoying swivel between the two which made it impossible to properly orient myself to field the ball.

Even worse the bases remained in the first orientation when it came to the controller. So I couldn't throw to the right base. It feels like if I want to throw from the outfield to second base I should hold down and throw but that would send it to home plate. Even after I figured out what was going on I couldn't get my hand to listen because of so much baseball game muscle memory.

I pitched to 9 batters. All 9 hit balls that should have resulted in an out. Instead they scored 6 runs and left the bases loaded. I wanted to try out hitting but I couldn't conceive of ever getting anyone out.


Rating: F-

#40: Extra Innings

Oh my!

Extra Innings is a baseball game I'd never played before. To be blunt, I didn't miss very much. The characters are chibi style, and the game plays fine, but it's still a baseball game.

Go Copernicus!

I picked a team at random, and it turned out to be pretty sweet. Look at those names! SCIENCE!

Temper Temper...

The game had some nice extras. It has a league function, and it has a 'create a team' function. Batting and pitching worked reasonably well, but were pretty standard. Fielding was slow and plodding, just like pretty much every other baseball game.

There's not really much to say. It's a baseball game. It isn't a bad baseball game. It isn't a spectacular baseball game. I guess if you really want to play some video game baseball you could do worse than this. But I don't want to play a baseball game. With 10% of the games thus far having been baseball games, I'm getting a little tired of them.

Rating: B-

#37: Nolan Ryan's Baseball

Celebrity endorsed!

With a player the calibre of Nolan Ryan on the title screen I had high hopes. This is the third baseball game in 37 total games, which seems like a lot, but it was the first one with an actual player on the front. One of the previous baseball games got a C rating, the other is currently third overall in my rankings. How would this one fare?

Ooh, cutscenes for close plays!

Well, let me put it to you this way... I played three innings and decided to quit. I couldn't bring myself to even finish a single game. You'd think with a pro player in the title that the game would actually play like a pro game. You're playing in a big stadium with a huge crowd. You can play a full season. So why does the game feel like it's being played by players at my baseball skill level?

Other than hitting homeruns, that is.

The players all look like little kids on the field, and they play like them. The computer hit the ball right at my shortstop. He tried to throw the runner out at first base. He threw it in a big arc, and the ball had to bounce before it made it there. The runner was safe by a mile. This is exactly how my last few years of baseball went. I didn't have any arm strength at all and I simply couldn't throw the ball all the way from short to first. It made me a terrible, terrible player and no one should have wanted me on their team. How this pro game can feel like it can get away with having me play third base is mind boggling.

It doesn't stop there. Most hits couldn't make it out of the infield, and only one (the home run above) made it to the wall. As a result hitting was an exercise in frustration. Fortunately the computer seemed mostly incapable of putting the ball over the plate so I scooped up walk after walk by simply refusing to swing. This, again, is how I played baseball as a kid. I'm sure I lead the league in walks the year I kept accurate stats for my own team. I had something like .920 on base percentage. By never swinging. Because I knew I couldn't hit the ball hard enough to get it out of the infield. And when you're 9 years old maybe that makes sense. When you're in a pro baseball game, not so much.

The computer was no better at hitting the ball, or in figuring out when to swing. I found that if I threw a fastball right over the outside corner of the plate he'd never swing but it would be a strike. So if I found the right position each at bat I was guaranteed to get a strike out. This isn't fun. It's incredibly boring.

Fielding also worked counter-intuitively. Normally in a baseball game when the ball is hit towards third base your thirdbaseman would go and get the ball and shortstop would automatically cover third base. You'd be controlling the thirdbaseman. But I'd try to control the thirdbaseman, actually be controlling the shortstop, and run him the wrong way. While the thirdbaseman happily jogged to third and ignored the ball HIT RIGHT AT HIM! GAH!

I almost feel like I should be a little lenient with the rating because it does have a lot of nice league features. You can play a full season, you can trade players around, you can even make your own players. I do like these sorts of things, and normally those would be the features that would push a game over the top for me. But pushing a giant pile of garbage over the top doesn't really help you out. You're still standing behind a giant pile of garbage. I feel bad for the poor people on the other side of the hill... You're just going to be dumping garbage on their heads.

It also doesn't use nearly enough buttons. I could only find a use for A and B, and those uses were reversed from how most games work.

I didn't play this game as a kid, and I am incredibly thankful for that. This game sucks.

Rating: F-

#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+

#12: Super Bases Loaded

Gratuitous butt shots have changed in 21 years...

Super Bases Loaded was the first non-bundled game we had for the SNES when I was a kid. (I believe our Uncle John Boy gave it to us at the same Christmas we got the SNES.) As such this is actually one of my most played SNES games. Compared to previous baseball games we'd played (Baseball on the Intellivision and Street Sports Baseball on the Commodore 64) this game was pretty good. The controls were pretty responsive, you could sub in pinch hitters, plenty of different teams to play...

I have played the perfect game.

It also had an interesting rating system. You earned points for awesome plays. You lost points for striking out, and committing errors, and lots of other bad things. It gave the game some bonus replayability that didn't exist in previous games.  Not as good as adding in a season/league format but still a good step forward.

Quorb! Quorb! He's our man!

I tried to remember which team I used to play and thought there was a reasonable chance it was the K team. As soon as I saw the starting lineup page I knew I'd picked right. Even after all these years I still remember Lynn, Leigh, Quorb... Ryan as the starting pitcher. It's definitely time to play ball!

Sponsored by Saiko?

I managed to hit a home run! You get treated to a little montage with confetti and some scoreboard animations.

Underhanded!

One thing I remembered was how stupidly overpowered the K closer was. He threw underhand and had a really fast fastball. You hold up to throw hard and to throw high and it just combines very well with an underhanded pitcher to be practically unhittable by a human player. The computer didn't do much better here!

Whew!

I ended up barely winning the game (I actually had a big lead but then had a bit of a bad inning in the 8th. My closer was only good for one inning it turned out and I tried to play him in the 7th and 8th and it went poorly.) But the real question is... Did I play a perfect game?!?

Turns out no. Not even close. I struck out 7 times, hit a guy, and walked a guy. It was an intentional walk (runner on 2nd, 1 out, and his pitcher was on deck) but the game still dinged me 3 points for it. Sigh.

At any rate I have absolutely no desire to play a second game. It was an interesting nostalgic trip but the game hasn't actually aged all that well. Pitching isn't as robust as I'd like now. No curve balls. No real way to throw high and slow or low and fast. But for the time it was pretty fun.

Rating: C