Developed by: Nintendo R&D1 Published by: Nintendo
Introduction & Bias:
Ah, baseball. This was my favorite sport as a kid. I can't really tell you why I picked baseball as my favorite sport but it was. Not that I was any good at it, mind you. On a team of 10 little leaguers I permanently had a spot on the bench. Part of the issue was athletics but I don't think I really got how physicality was supposed to work when I was six years old. I might have just been a stupid kid.
But my feelings toward sports based video games continues. I feel it is just really hard to condense a real life activity with tons of rules such as football or baseball into a tiny NES game. In spite of those feelings we are here with Sports Pentalogy Part 2. This is the NES's first baseball game which is intuitively titled Baseball. This reminds me of the Atari games where the sports and activities were named after the sport in question. You had Football, Basketball, Golf, Bowling, and... Casino? I think maybe the Atari games were so simply named because Atari had to spell out to the consumer just what they were buying because the graphics were so primitive. Now that we are in the NES era the graphics are improved and I think the naming conventions could have stretched their legs a bit.
So here we have America's national pastime with an outdated name on the new 8-bit video game system. I have never played this video game before. Will it hit a home run or will it strike out? Will I have more baseball cliches to throw into this review? Let's find out!
First Impressions & Conveyance:
I do have to say that I was pretty happy turning on Baseball. The title card is kind of cute as Baseball is spelled out with a bunch of baseballs. Nice touch. There is a short music jingle, too! Wow, a first for this blog. We are back to using Select to change game modes between 1 and 2 players, though. Oh, well. I guess Nintendo was still trying to justify having that button.
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| Pictured: Baseball made of baseballs! It's baseball-ception! |
I was supplied with demonstrations for this game so I watched a few of them. It was hard to tell just what I was in control of at any given time based on the demos. The game was intuitively set up so that the pitcher and the batter could duel. If contact is made on the ball it goes into the field like one would expect, the ball is fielded and plays are made at the different bases. Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary. The object still appeared to be to hit the ball so the runners can advance through the four bases to score a run. The team with the most runs wins. It doesn't seem like the video game made up any new rules to baseball so once I saw a couple of example plays I started up the game.
Once I selected my lonely 1 player game I immediately faced a choice of team to select. No team names were available but I did see an option to pick the Y team. I assumed it was the Yankees so that made my choice clear since I was raised in New York. Don't hate. The computer had already selected their team so if they selected Y then I would have been locked out. As soon as I picked team Y I was dumped into the game with no ceremony. I must have been the away team since I was up to bat first.
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| Pictured: Yay team Y! Yes! You can do it, Yo! Yahoo! |
Anyway.
The rest of the playing experience was similarly not instructed. Fielding, running bases, pitching, and throwing to bases all had to be figured out on the fly. I think I learned pretty much everything I needed to but some actions, like trying to take an extra base off of a hit, took me until the end of my first game to figure out and I never could gather how to steal bases.
I have enough real life baseball experience to know that I was missing out on a lot of potential strategy options and this ended up hurting my gaming experience overall.
Experience & Presentation:
Let me summarize how my first game went. It was bad. The fans abandoned the franchise, the coach was fired, and the ball boy was never heard from again. The blowout was terrible. I am pretty sure that my personal reaction to the Y team went from "Y for Yay!" to "Y should I bother?"
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| Pictured: Shame. Not Pictured: An angry nun ringing a hand bell |
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| Pictured: A baseball to the face! Not Pictured: Not being awarded a free base after getting murdered by a pitch |
When I played defense my abilities and inabilities became even clearer. Pitching the ball was the most strategic aspect. I could hold one or two directions when I pitched to get fast balls, slower balls, balls pitched inside and outside, and more normal pitches. Mixing up pitches and striking players out is probably the best way to go because the player should not let the computer get a ball in play. Whenever my team fielded the ball it seemed to take forever. I counted at least three times that the ball would get past my center fielder and roll all the way to the wall, the center fielder would stop dead in his tracks, and to have the left fielder cross all the way over to actually pick up the ball and throw it back in. This turned easy fly-outs into triples for the computer team. I had no ability to pick who was fielding nor could I mash buttons to get them to speed up. It was this constant ballet of errors taking place on a field covered in molasses.
My infielders were similarly useless. Whenever a ground ball was hit to my shortstop the ball would come to him... and roll right by. This didn't inspire much rage in me as much a general feeling of disgust and helplessness. I didn't have a button to press on time to field correctly and if I did I sure as hell didn't know about it. I have other examples of incompetence but overall I did not have a lot of agency or control over my success or failure. Being backed up by a bunch of gorillas when the controller was out of my hands was a very unrewarding experience.
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| Pictured: The score of the game at the end of my hour. And more shame *ding ding* |
The graphics themselves are nice enough. The players have a lot of different poses to strike depending on the action. Lots of pitching, batting, fielding, catching, and throwing sprites were present. Even the umpire gave the whoop-de-do signal that they are supposed to when a home run is hit.
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| Not Pictured: The umpire on the right flipping the players off. I promise |
Verdict & Score:
It's a shame that Baseball was such a letdown. It's unfair to expect the game developers to know that baseball was my sport of choice as a kid but for a sport that is so popular in America and Japan I think more innovations could have been made to make a good baseball experience on the NES. With no instructions on the controls, brainless AI, and only a few credits given to the overall presentation I decide to give Baseball a 3(4)/10. I think this game suffers the most from the fact that it is trying to simulate such a complicated game. I wonder how later baseball games will fare.
Factoids & Trivia:
There is evidence that Nintendo banked on the popular appeal of the sport of baseball to help lift up Baseball the video game and the NES in general. The NES was launched in the US on October 18th, 1985 in a press event in Manhattan. The NES was not sold nationwide until almost a year later so several test markets were used to lead up to its nationwide launch. Baseball the video game was played by some current Major League Baseball players at the press event. Presumably they might have played for team Y.
If Baseball was really influential back in 1985 its demand has fallen off significantly since then. A copy of Baseball in its collector's-worthy black box does see offers for $40 online but the cart itself sells for as little as a dollar. It is notable that Baseball was developed for the Japanese Famicom and the NES primarily rather than being a refinement of previous arcade games and concepts. Baseball was ported over to Nintendo's VS series of arcade cabinets where it enjoyed some upgraded graphics and sounds.
And, yes, Y stood for Yankees. Nintendo did not get an actual licensing agreement with any baseball league so the developers settled for using initials to stand in for the team names. In Japan the teams were named after some Japanese Central League clubs while the letters stood for the Athletics, Cardinals, Dodgers, Phillies, Royals, and Yankees in the American release.
The Sportsball Pentalogy continues next time with something a little slower paced. Coming up next we will tee up a review of Golf. Yeah, just Golf. I know, I'm excited, too.
Sources:
NES box art:
Prices sourced from E-bay on 1/30/2016
The Baseball wiki page:
YouTube link:
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