Tag Archives: Video Games

Stuff I found in Storage: Sammy Sosa’s Softball Slam

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This is something that could just as easily be a Bizarre Baseball Culture. It’s the Sammy Sosa-starring slow-pitch softball, uhm… “classic”:  Sammy Sosa Softball Slam.

SammySosaSlamSammySosaSlam2I would have reinstalled this game to do a review, but I decided not to… because I can remember how much it sucked. I have played many horrible games in my day: I flew through freaking hoops in Superman 64 (how can you make a Superman game where the main activity is FLYING THROUGH FREAKING HOOPS!?!?!), I played a horrible Pokemon knock-off masquerading as an adaptation of Animorphs, I think I even played ET The Extraterrestrial for the Atari 2600 once in a museum somewhere.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam is in that category of horrible. It was, for one thing, hilariously bad an idea. Let’s make a softball game… BUT WITH SAMMY SOSA! Even admitting this was the year 2000, I have to think some type of hallucinogens were involved for such a bizarre idea to happen.

The game itself wasn’t that much better. It was easy no matter what mode you were doing, the players involved (with the exception of Sammy himself) were ridiculously nondescript (compare this to the colorful cast of the great Backyard Baseball series), the graphics were bad even for their day, the announcer was annoying (he’d call Sammy “the man, the myth, the legend” basically every other time he came to the plate) and, oh, right, it was still a softball game starring Sammy Sosa. By the way, I remember that Sammy’s statistics were maxed out in the game, and that there was also a button on the player editing screen that would allow you to transform any player into Sammy Sosa- even if the player was a woman! Yes, with just the tap of a button, you could change anyone, regardless of age, race, or gender, into Sammy Sosa circa-2000… to play slow-pitch softball.

Think about the horrible implications of that.

Yeah, scary.

Oh, and this was the “thrilling” opening to the game. Although this is from the Playstation version and not the PC version, I seem to recall it being very similar:

(Shivers)

RANDOM THING: Ninja Baseball Batman

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I am working on an article about my memories of some of the great baseball video games of the past, but while doing research, I have found something that will blow everyone’s mind: Ninja Baseball Batman.

What is Ninja Baseball Batman? I’ll let this video by James Rolfe, who has a web series, “The Angry Video Game Nerd”, in which he (in character) foul-mouthedly reviews crummy or bizarre games, tell it:

So, basically, Ninja Baseball Batman is a obscure beat-em up game in which you play as ninja baseball players. For those of you who skipped the video, the reason you have never heard of it is because it was only in arcades- not consoles- and was a total failure, selling only 43 machines. It was only found when some gamers came across it on (technically illegal) emulators. Therefore, I haven’t played it, and probably won’t, unless it’s released on a console I have or comes to the PC or Mac.

But, man, this seems like it would be the most bizarre baseball culture. Weirder than the “Double Trouble Header”, weirder than Martian baseball, and even weirder than Rockets Freaking Rigby. I mean, apparently the plot of this game is that the Commissioner hires four ninja baseball players named Ryno, Straw, Roger and Jose to retrieve objects stolen from the Hall Of Fame. Yes, there is a video game that exists that has ninja baseball players named after Ryne Sandberg, Darryl Strawberry, Roger Clemens and Jose Canseco. Although, to be fair, this is like the fifth weirdest thing to ever involve Jose Canseco.

So, there you go, a random post about some obscure video game I have never played… and one of the most unusual baseball-related products in history.

Will MVP Baseball return?

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Baseball is paradoxically both one of the best sports for video games to be made on, yet also one of the worst. It is one of the best due to the general obsessiveness of baseball fans, the vast number of statistics, players and strategic decisions and varied playing fields. It is one of the worst because it is hard to make a good baseball video game these days, and expensive. It takes a lot of time and money to make all of the stadiums, uniforms (not just MLB but also MiLB and throwback unis), players (having basically everyone have the same face isn’t good enough), motion captures, play-by-play recordings and all of the other stuff. And, even then, there is a lot of intangible stuff that they can mess up. When done right, it is awesome, when done wrong, it makes you want to pull your hair out.

We are now entering what appears to be a dark age of baseball video games: The MLB 2K series, the crappy replacement that was forced upon everyone without a PlayStation when Take-Two Entertainment signed a third-party exclusivity deal with MLB in the mid-2000s, is near death. This would, usually, be a good thing. However, it also means that it is now likely that there will be no traditional baseball games outside of the PlayStation produced and exclusive The Show next year, and possibly the year after that. This is because, as I mentioned above, making a good MLB game is a time-consuming and expensive process, and now isn’t the time for a company to start from scratch.

(continued)

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