Sports
October 1985 (Nintendo)
I really want to like Baseball. It’s simple. No pitch controls, just throw the ball and somewhat control it by pressing left and right on the D pad to make curves, sliders, and screwballs. Press down to make it go faster and up to make it go slower. Pitching is pretty easy.
Hitting is pretty easy too. You press A to swing the bat. You need to hold it down, because you stop your swing when you stop pressing the button. Timing can be a bit wonky, but that’s how baseball games work.
Fielding is almost nonexistent. I could never seem to control the players. This actually didn’t bother me too much since I’ve never been that good at fielding anyway so that’s not a big loss. I could still throw the ball where I wanted.
There are some problems though that make it pretty unplayable today.
First off, let’s go right back to the fielding. They tend to suck. Balls that I would have no problem fielding myself easily get by the players. The outfielders in particular take terrible routes to the ball. It also seems that each player has a defined spot that they’ll attempt to catch a pop fly in. My catcher wouldn’t go a few feet outside the dirt around home plate for a pop-up that ended up dropping for a foul ball. Despite this he was still the closest to catching the ball.
Someone obviously thought about this game and added some nice touches, one of those being that the pitchers will shake off pitches. This seems pretty cool, until you want to actually pitch the ball. I had to wait for my pitcher to shake off 2 and 3 pitches way too often. This happened whether I was pressing buttons to pitch the ball or not.
This is just one example of how slow the game is. The other big thing to point out is that there’s a song after every half inning that shows while you see the scoreboard. You can’t skip over this, which really sucks when you just want to get on with the game.
On the funny side though is the umpire. Yes, there’s only one. And he magically teleports to where ever he needs to be to make the call. I don’t think this is a problem at all. I actually think it’s kind of cool.
If I have some time to waste this is a decent game to play around with. But it’s not something I’d want to invest a lot of time into.
When I was in college (not that long ago – mid 00′s), we had a stack of second-rate NES games in the dorm lounge (F-Zero being the most popular), and this was one. We got pretty good at two-player mode, which is about .01% more exciting than one-player. “Ooh! Where’s the ball going to go???”
At least 2 player mode is fair since it sucks for everyone involved. But I have to say that I’m really jealous that there was an actual NES there for everyone to play.
Of course, we couldn’t have pulled that off because we had some really stupid people on my floor.
For purist baseball NES game excellence, I stick to R.B.I. Baseball, but reading this review does make me want to play Magic Teleporting Umpire sometime.