Nintendo Project: 10 Baseball Games

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Baseball, America’s supposed national pastime, represents a pastoral tradition in America that, if it ever existed, is long since dead, though at whose hands one cannot readily tell. A sport beloved by a particular rarified middle class impossibly distant from the very agrarian nature that the pleasant greenery represented by the baseball diamond

Comments

[best_ken_ever]

1. It is not a sufficiently popular sport.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sports_attendance_figures#Top_10_in_total_attendance

2. Japan and Cuba would kick our fucking asses to the curb
I feel that this is a really questionable statement. Many other countries' top stars now play in the MLB, which is one major reason why, when the World Baseball Classic comes around, the actual U.S. team doesn't destroy all competition. (Another major one being that not all of the top U.S. players participate, as they're otherwise about to get underway for a really grueling six- (or more likely seven-) month season.)

3. The baseball games are marked by one crucial problem - they are all the exact same game
This is quite false. I find some games, like the Bases Loaded series, to suck quite a lot. The controls are awkward, the computer is Nintendo-hard, the game is just not put together well.
RBI Baseball (and sequels) is known for its solid relationship with actual player data from that time period and general balance. It's a simple game, but it's got solid game play and is a great introduction to sports on NES.
Baseball Simulator 1.000 and Baseball Stars were years ahead of their time. Twenty years ago, creating your own characters in a sports game was unheard of. Now, it is what all sports video games are about, from college basketball to football to snowboarding and skateboarding to even pro wrestling. And they had this in 1989 and 1990. Customizability generates originality and replay value, and the controls are excellent for an NES game, too.

4. the computer does disproportionately well.
Like any other game, beating the computer just takes practice with the system. I have had a game where I've scored something like 28-29 runs in the first inning and the game called it against a poor computer opponent, and I've had games that go into the sixteenth inning (including unbroken ties and re-ties) against excellent computers. There's definitely a challenge here, but a good player can certainly overcome them.

5. its narcotic dullness substituting for fun.
I still play my NES. The game currently in my NES is Baseball Simulator 1.000. I have just begun a season with manually-input 2009 stats from six major league teams. I got this game something like 17 years ago, and it still has replay value for me, every year, as actual teams change and I endeavor to model how this game believes they perform against each other.

6. Base Wars
No comment.

7.
6. Base Wars
No comment.
Now that I look at some videos, it looks *awesome* and I would love to play. So there. (:

[snowspinner]

1) Oh, come now, Ken. You're not going to fall into the poor statistical trap of using total stadium attendance to measure popularity, are you? Baseball has by far the most games of the season of any of the sports listed. It would be difficult for them not to top that. Meanwhile, almost every NFL game sells out, and the season is paltry in size compared to baseball.

2) Also, it's conceivable that the US has a better doping program than Japan or Cuba, which might even the odds back up.

3) Eh. I mean, RBI Baseball was not one of the 10 here. The 10 were, I should note: Bad News Baseball, Base Wars, Bases Loaded 1-4, Baseball Simulator 1.000, Baseball Stars 1 and 2, and Baseball. So I can't speak to that. But I'm skeptical of the customizability argument here - it seems like customizability extends the value of a game, yes. But it doesn't create it. Baseball Simulator 1.000 is the best of the lot, certainly (except for Base Wars), but in a fundamental sense, that's not saying much - the problem of how to transfer baseball to video games and have a fun play mechanic is not one that seems to me to be solved yet.

4) Sure. My problem is with the particular experience of watching the computer handle fielding versus doing it. In all of the games - Baseball Simulator 1.000 included - there's a strange clumsiness to the controls on this element that the computer naturally doesn't suffer from.

[best_ken_ever]

1) As a statistician, I claim free reign on twisting numbers to suit my needs in order to measure the abstract concept "popularity". I wonder if all NFL games would sell out if there were 40 of them per team a season.

2) Maybe so.

3) Oh, that's right. RBI starts with "R". I'm sorry for Bases Loaded 1. That was just awful. I can't speak for 2-4. I've never spent a lot of time on Stars, but it seems like it's even better than my standby, Simulator. Stars seems to have a financial aspect to it, and I really look forward to finding a cartridge and putting some serious time into it. It seems really solid.

4) I have come to have pretty good controls. After 10 minutes of warm-up, I field more or less as well as the computer. It's not perfect, but neither is it. On what sort of console are you playing? My NES is pretty perfect, but my backup NES/SNES 3rd party thing I got on Amazon has a controller which is less than perfect, so I find it does not respond quite as well. Perhaps you are suffering from the same issue?

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Also, wait, you use a game where the pitcher can throw fireballs to model reality?

[best_ken_ever]

To be fair, I grew out of using the "powers" years ago. I play the game straight, and sometimes, for a challenge, I'll play a straight team against a computer with powers. That's pretty fun and usually pretty close. Defending against exploding baseballs is not realistic, but it is interesting to me.