Baseball Stars

"The first *real* Nintendo baseball game..."

Think of baseball games for the Nintendo Entertainment System and you would probably come up with games such as Bases Loaded and RBI Baseball. If you look a little further back, you’ll find a game that was a rather interesting title by the name of Baseball Stars. While recreating the world of baseball in a slightly flashier fashion, Baseball Stars was one of the first baseball games on the NES to offer you different selectable teams, different stadiums and a slew of other options that weren’t available anywhere else! Given several teams, it was up to you and your team to make it through endless games of baseball while beating out the computer or a friend on the field of honor. What made this title so good, was the sheer amount of game play choices and options you had to play with and choose! With the two-player competitive spirit in mind, Baseball Stars is a game that is easily played and fondly remembered to those of us who can remember that far back into NES gaming.

The game play follows that of the actual game of baseball. You choose a team which is comprised of several different positions that cover the different spots on the field. You have different players for these positions and depending on what their rating is in the line up {this is unchangeable} you may have players that are superstars of that position or may not do you any good! Something that was a new feature was the fact that you could change out your players depending on who you had in back up on your roster. In the middle of a game, you could change out a player who was making too many errors and even the pitcher if he was letting too many hits go by. This was a definite upgrade from NES Baseball, in which you were pretty much stuck with whatever you had on your team, and luck was your only friend! Other aspects of the game cover both the pitching and the batting portions of the game, in which you can select different kinds of pitches from a menu and then use that pitch to try and strike out your opponent. Like with baseball, there are six outs per inning {three per team} and nine innings in a game, which can make for either a long or short game, depending on how many points you can score! With the two-player option, you can go through and select from several different teams and then select the field that you wish to play in. In today’s standards, this may seem like nothing new, but to the NES and its owners at the time, this was top of the line and even today, Baseball Stars shows plenty of innovation and imagination.

Getting into the control is something that takes plenty of practice to get down to a science. Once you’ve gotten the overall controls down, then you need to learn how to switch your throws in between the different bases in order to get the outs! Your pitching menu consists of what type of pitch you’re going to throw, but unlike future baseball games, you couldn’t control just where the pitch was heading. Batting is also an easy task to complete by simply focusing your eye on the ball, and catching the right timing in order to try and nail a home run. Controls like these make games this old plenty of fun to play and Baseball Stars really doesn’t disappoint in this area! Gamers of any age and of any skill can pick up the game and learn how to perform the controls within minutes, and only experience and time will have you throwing the ball between bases like a pro.

Visually, the game featured a couple of really neat looking views when you were batting or pitching. The behind the home base view is probably one of the best I’ve seen in a sports game this old, and it really showed the effort and detail that went into the making of the game! There is nothing like seeing your pitcher wind up and chuck the ball at you to make you stop and grin a little bit before you wail away at it. The outfield camera is a high overhead shot that allows you to see where the ball is going and to whom it is traveling to. Some of the more impressive effects comes with the homeruns that you {or the computer} may make at any given time, allowing for some ‘fireworks’!

The audio in Baseball Stars is something that has to be listened to in order to be understood. While keeping to the spirit of baseball and everything, the light tune that you hear throughout the game isn’t enough to really keep your interests. Even though it does keep the spirit, the sound effects are also a little on the bland side and can really make you feel as though you are sitting at the ball game! I don’t know about the rest of you, but ball games and what you hear really isn’t all that appealing to me, so you’d do well to throw something into the CD player and hit play while throwing the ball around. Compound this by having to sit through nine innings of three up and three down, and you’ll find that the audio selection is really the only thing that can be complained about.

Baseball Stars is a game that is fondly remembered by me as a game that offered up several different aspects that just weren’t available to gamers at that time. With the different teams and the different stadiums that you could play in, there isn’t much here that you could complain on other than the quality of the audio! The advanced menus {which really aren’t} and the different views were cutting edge at the time, with the game play being two steps above NES Baseball. While Baseball Stars isn’t RBI or Bases Loaded, it is a game that is worth picking up and playing for the sake of seeing what a good early sports game on the NES really looks like!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/04/01, Updated 12/04/01