GAME CLEAR No. 290 -- Baseball

Baseball (1983, FC/FDS/NES)

Developer: Nintendo R&D1, Intelligent Systems
Publisher: Nintendo
Clear Version: Family Computer
Clear Platform: New Famicom
Clear Date: 4/1/26

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Why should I care?
It’s black-box/pulse-line sports, baby.

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The old ballgame

I just can’t stop beating little 8-bit sports games on my Family Computer. This time it’s Baseball.

It’s a remarkably competent little simulator. It’s also as simple as it gets. You have a small selection of teams to choose from. Since the game lacks any licensing, their names are all a single letter. They have distinct uniform colors, but that’s it. I chose S because they have similar colors to what my beloved Braves wore in the ’80s.

My understanding is that the teams have no statistical differences. If the individual players on each team do, it is certainly not surfaced anywhere in the game. There are no substitutions, no injuries, no pitcher fatigue. Nothing to “manage” on that side of the game. Fielding is also automatic up to the point that the ball is in a fielder’s hand. At that point, you must decide where it is thrown, but that is it.

The game, then, mostly comes down to its primitive hitting and pitching. When you’re pitching, you have five options, chosen with the d-pad. Fastball, curveball, screwball, “slow” ball, and “regular” ball. I’d say the latter two would probably be more accurately described as eephus and changeup respectively.

It could be my imagination, but CPU opponents seem to really reward mixing up pitches and jump all over repeated pitches. Laziness is punished. Similarly, the AI does a good job of mixing up its own pitches to keep you guessing.

Still, batting is much simpler. All you can do is move your player around very slightly within the batter’s box and time your swings correctly. There is no distinction between power and contact swings or anything like that as in more modern baseball games. If you have one or more men on base, you can have them lead off or steal, but the computer is pretty slick at stopping you. I only managed to swipe one bag in the couple dozen innings I played.

What really keeps the scoring going is that the defense is pretty bad. Ground balls frequently squeak through the infield and go all the way to the wall as the outfielders struggle to take an optimal path to the ball. Fortunately, they also have cannons for arms, so it’s often pretty easy to gun down an opponent going for extra bases. Ultimately, it’s just a different way you have to think about the game. Crazy ground balls more or less take the place of line-drive gappers.

It wouldn’t be baseball without home runs, though. I managed a couple in my few games of play, including one that completely left the fucking ballpark. Can’t say I’ve ever done that in any of the many other baseball sims I’ve played.

A cute little fanfare plays when you manage a dinger, which is nice since the game otherwise only plays tiny little musical interludes between innings. It’s just beeps and boops of pitches, strikes, and batted balls otherwise. Not surprising for a launch-year Famicom game, but a bit underwhelming nevertheless. You can play some ambient crowd noise on your phone or something if you like, I suppose.

I’ll also give this game credit for keeping things close. In the two complete games I played, I lost a heartbreaker 6-5 and won a nail-biter 5-4. That’s top-shelf baseball right there.

Also, as I undergo the humbling task of learning pixel art, I do appreciate the simple and functional work on display here. Much prettier things would be wrung out of the Family Computer’s hardware, but what’s on display here works just fine. There’s a lesson there for me.