Bases Loaded

"I'll stick to the later installments..."

Again I’ve played another baseball game and I’ve found that this one is just like all of the others in the NES library in terms of the way that it looks and the way that it plays. Bases Loaded has gotten better in the later portions of the series, but in its humble beginnings it didn’t start out as the best game. The team selection wasn’t the greatest and the animations were horrendous by far, matching only that of the oldest baseball game of them all, NES Baseball. When it comes to improvement, the series had gotten better as the games tended to improve, leaving this one as a deep dark secret.

Bases Loaded does not feature the depth of Baseball Simulator, nor the combat of Base Wars or the speed of RBI. It also does not feature the real players of baseball like Baseball stars and doesn’t have the down and dirty game play of Dusty Diamond. In all reality, you might have to think that this is the worst baseball game ever and you would only be half right. While the game isn’t the shining point of baseball games everywhere, it does offer a little insight into the beginnings of one of the more prominent baseball game series on the NES.

The game play here features the same typical play that games of this genre have to offer and you will find that there is plenty of batting and fielding here. There are only a hand full of teams that are available to you and you have the option of playing two different modes that come in the form of either a vs. mode or a pennant mode. When you get into the game itself, you have twelve different teams that you can choose from and then you start playing in the pennant race. The game difficulty is only as difficult as the computer decides to make it, so you have to be sure that you have the right pitcher up when the opponent is at bat.

Getting further into the game brings plenty of problems in terms of the speed at which the game plays and the computer plays. For the most part, unless your fielder is dead on with the falling ball, you will find yourself missing the catch and the play being good. I haven’t encountered an error yet in the way that the fielders catch the ball aside from the fact that they move so slowly that if you’re off just a little, it takes forever to pick up the ball. Something else that caught me was the fact that most of the pitches that you throw tend to stay on target, which makes it either very easy or very hard for the computer to it.

Batting is a little different in this game than in other baseball games based on the fact that you can hit at three different height levels. This comes in handy when you have a pitcher throwing the ball at either your head, your chest or your legs and it spells the difference between getting a hit and striking out completely. A password feature gives you the ability to come back at a later day and finish up the pennant race which is pretty important if you don’t have time to play through the entire season. Other than that, the game plays just like every other baseball game and you won’t find anything new.

Control is limited to either pitching and fielding, or batting and running. All of these actions are pretty self explanatory and you don’t have to worry about performing anything extremely important in order to win the game. When you get into the fielding, you might have to get used to assigning the throw to the correct bases because the NES directional pad is a little touchy. Running requires the correct base assignment and doesn’t always go the way that you want it to go, so be aware of that if you’re going to try for more bases than you can actually handle.

Visually, Bases Loaded is about as basic of a game as you can get without returning to the days of NES Baseball. While I’m trying to keep the references to other games limited, I’ve played several baseball games now and watched the way that they look and act. The first thing that you’re going to notice is that you won’t have much detail or base color in your players when the fielding screen comes up and it looks like blobs running across the screen. Another part of the visuals is that the players don’t feature much uniform detail aside from different colors to show what team you happen to be playing for.

The music selection here is a little limited as well, with one steady tune playing through the game when the game does happen to call for it. You will find that the music doesn’t change no matter what the situation might be and that could be a little too quiet for most gamers tastes. The sound effects that you have at your disposal are limited and basic to the point of just being the occasional beep. Something that I did find interesting is that the game does try to offer up speech that allows you hear the calls as they are coming out with beeps that sound like safe and strike.

Bases Loaded isn’t a tough game to play, but it is a little harder to enjoy knowing that there are other games out there that have a ton of options and look better in the long run. Without the knowledge of this, you might find that this game is charming and that it is fun to play when you don’t have anything else. While this game was the first in the series and should have brought up some interesting game features, I found better improvements in later installments. Baseball fans can take this one out to the park but the casual watcher might want something a little more impressive to feed their weekend warrior sports soul.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 10/29/03