Foreword

One of the most popular sports in Japan is baseball, and the videogame developer companies from that country ussually created games about that sport, and within years, it became a fierce competition which gave the videoplayers a lot of great quality baseball videogames.

Sega developed better sport titles for its consoles than Nintendo during early 90s, and one of the best was the japanese videogame Pro Yakyuu Super League ‘91, but as ussual, it was adapted for the north american market, in this particular game, the music was changed to spoken comments in the videogame, which along with the great playability it already had, became in one of the best baseball videogames for the Genesis.

Game

The game provides a view, up to this time, classic batting perspective from behind the batter, in this case, is very defined which easies a lot how to hit the ball, and considering this is traditionally my weakness in this kind of videogames, well, it’s a relief.

The videogame really exploits the Megadrive default controller, considering the 3 buttons of the earlier controller and the newer of 6 buttons. Use the standard (to that time) of indicating with the controller to which base run, throw or hit. You can try a full swing, butting, stealing or returning to the base.

The videogame has s lot of modes: The Full Season mode, where you can set the number of games of the season, from 15, 30, 81 or 162 games, where the stats are storing of what happens in each game. Other mode is an All-Star game with the best players from the other teams available in the game, and finally, probably the most played, the Exhibition game, which is against the Artificial Intelligence or against a human player.

Every match has a really good pace, the dimensions of the field feels adequate and it’s quite easy to tell if you can try to get an extra base or not. Also, it’s very simple to move the fielders thru the field to either catch a fly, or executing double-plays. Steals are easy with fast players. Batting is easier than in other videogames of the time, and again, this is my weakness, so if I can hit, either can you.

But, to my humble opinion, the new and most notable feature is the narrator, which is awesome. This is the main difference between this version and the japanese one, because it took the place of the music. The commenter sometimes get a bit behind what is happening in the game, but it can be a quite hilairous at times.

Teams

It was very frequent that in the port to the North American market, the most logical step was to use the Major League Baseball teams. However, I don’t get it why the license from the MLB Players Association was acquired, but not the one for the teams. So, just like previous baseball videogame titles, the teams appears with the names of the cities, but not the full names. On the other side, the rosters were quite accurate, in this game, from the MLB 1992 season.

Also, since the team’s names were not available, neither the logos, but were used logos very similar to the real ones, and in some cases better than the original ones. You can see a comparative here.

Epilogue

This videogame was not very appreciated at the time, it looked like Sega tried to create an imprint for sports videogames, just like RealSports of Atari, but this baseball title, sadly, didn’t deliver as expected.

There was one of American Football, even with sequels, and very probably there will be an entry about this series.

Highly recommended baseball videogame, it’s a shame that at the time, I didn’t play it, but right now, it’s one of my favourites for a casual baseball match.

References

Sport Icon designed by Smashicons of FlatIcon licensed by CC 3.0 BY

Console Icon taken from Retroarch.

Major League Baseball team logos taken from SportsLogos.