Baseball

The Good
When I first booted up this game on my Nintendo I was sorely disappointed. The team selection consisted of a number of different colored guys, and that was that. After that it all just seemed pretty random. I’d bash the buttons and the players would sometimes just stand there, doing nothing, or run in a totally different direction than I had intended. It was a disaster. Nothing like what I’d imagined a baseball game on a computer would be like. I thought that, like most of the basic NES games, it would probably be much more fun in multiplayer. I was wrong. It just became even more chaotic, with each and everyone on the screen doing something completely random. I put the game in a dark and gloomy drawer where it was to lie for years to come.

Fast forward to the present day, a few days back. I thought I heard a cry for help, when I was strolling around the apartment. I brushed off the idea that it had come out of a drawer in my room, reasoning that ‘that would be silly’. Still, the drawer peaked my interest and I decided to have a look. There lay a computer game, by the name of Baseball. I blew off the layer of dust and popped it in my Nintendo. Me and my friend had been dying to try out some new game, being bored to death, and had seemingly no recollection of ever playing this game before. So, we started playing. And then another friend joined in. Of course, that meant there was always one of us watching the other two play.

That’s when I realized how deep this game was. I sat there watching my two friends play, and I began to memorize a bunch of tactics. We finally figured out how to make players run forward to the next base. We even discovered that we could have them running before the pitch. The sheer depth that the developers managed to pack into this small cartridge, and the NES’ two button controller, without the use of in-game menus was amazing. Sure, now you can find more complex baseball games, complete with inane uses of a bloated up user interface, with more in-game menus than a five-star restaurant. But no baseball game will top this game in its simple, yet deep gameplay.

The Bad
However, after three evenings jam-packed with Baseball sessions the game really started to tire us. Not that it was boring, it just really strains your mind to sit through nine rounds of what can sometimes be a really tight game. If your opponent’s good enough, you’ll end up having round upon round, getting none of your men to home base. And the more strategy you put into it, all the more time the game will take. Hardly a failure on the game’s end, but it’s still worth mentioning.

The Bottom Line
The game would hardly be worth a full price nowadays, but if you’re looking for something on the NES, aren’t too picky about graphics and enjoy depth of gameplay then look no further. This one will keep you busy for a while, so long as you give it a break every once in a while.