Baseball (Nintendo Famicom)

I'm not a huge fan of sports video games, in fact until recently I only owned a few select sports games. Over the past few weeks however I've started picking up various baseball games, both domestic and import games. Perhaps it's my love for watching baseball or my baseball card blog that has sparked the interest, but I figured why not share a few of these games.

I thought about doing a top 10 list, but it's so hard for me to rank games like that so I'll just stick to a single post for each game. I wasn't sure where to start either, so why not head to the 3rd generation and start with Baseball?

This is the Famicom version of the game obviously. The game was originally released in Japan in 1983 as part of the "pulse" set. This picture label of the game was released in 1985. Developed and published by Nintendo themselves, I thought this would be a pretty decent 8-bit game. Afterall, the game that shares the same name on the Game Boy was pretty good. Sadly I was wrong.

The game does support two player, head to head action...which I guess is a good thing. This game did not have any licensing from Major League Baseball or the Players Association, so all you get to chose from are a few generic teams represented by different letters of the alphabet.

There is only one game to play and that is your traditional 9 innings. No options to spice up the gameplay or to even shorten the length of the game.

This the main screen you'll see whether you're batting or pitching. It's pretty basic with your in field diamond and your infielders. Notice there is only one umpire and he's behind the plate. He'll magically appear in the field where there is a play at one of the bases. Your score and ball/strike count legends appear in the lower left corner of the screen.

Controls are pretty basic when it comes to pitching and fielding. The players will run to the ball when it's hit. If it's a pop fly, you can basically just let the computer guide your player underneath the ball for the out. However when it's a line drive to the outfield, you will have to direct you player to the ball. Then you'll have to wait and wait some more for the sluggish outfielder to pick up the ball. Right on the D-pad is 1st base, up is 2nd base and left is 3rd base. Pitching isn't complicated either. Press a direction on the D-pad and press B to throw the ball. Don't worry about walking too many batters or striking them out as the computer will most likely nail every pitch you make.

Get used to seeing this Home Run screen. Not because you are the one hitting all the HRs, but because the computer will probably bury you. My game started off pretty good, then in the 3rd inning I gave up a solo HR and then a 3 run HR. I eventually hit a HR of my own to come within 3 runs...then the massacre began. It was so depressing I turned the game off in the 7th inning because there was no way in hades I was going to win.

Yes, you read the score correctly. I was getting beat 26 to 1 in the top of the 7th inning. Maybe this is why I really don't like sports games...because I suck! Yeah, it was a pretty bad outing by me and my team...but I at least was able to enjoy the game. I can't say I'll be re-visiting this game much in the near future, it's still a fun reminder of how far baseball video games have come in the last 20 or so years.