"Strike One for Gameboy Nintendo games"

During the early days of the Gameboy, its sports titles were nothing more than ports of older Nintendo titles. Tennis, Soccer, Golf, they were all there. One of the ones they ported over was this game, Baseball. I'm not sure how the original game played, because I haven't tried it yet. But if it was any good, then this is a half-assed port. Everything about it feels like it might be ok at the core, but some things just really need some polish, or just some adequate care on them.

The graphics are decent for a launch title. Characters are SD, but I suppose its excusable, considering that it is near impossible to do a scale sprite on the NES. When you are on the pitching or the batting side, it looks pretty good. The batter and umpire are up close, so they look fairly detailed. The problem is the outfield. Once it zooms out to it, everything switches back to Atari-like graphics. Characters become ultra pixilated and the backgrounds become so simplistic it's laughable, even for the Gameboy. What also irritates me is that Nintendo was to lazy to let you see it from the Pitcher's point of view. The programmers obviously only designed the graphics for the batter's POV, so when they realized you'd have to play as the pitcher, they just flipped the variable around and let the small pitcher in the background move. Lazy move on their part.

The gameplay seems simple enough to be really fun when you think about it. Controls are simple enough with two buttons, and the basic gameplay seems pretty simple as well. Hit the ball when you are the batter and run, throw the ball and try to catch it when you are the pitcher. How could they screw that up? Well, they somehow managed to.

Batting isn't really much of a problem. You swing the bat when you want to try to hit the ball. They even add depth by making the ball have the ability to curve to throw you off, just like in real baseball. Luckily, the computer doesn't abuse it too much. But it's still a minor annoyance when the computer pitches it at your head and you stupidly bat. You can hold the bat out halfway to try for a bunt, which is a nice idea, but if the computer realizes it they immediately throw it in a different direction so you get a strike counted against you. But overall that's not too bad...until you start to run.

For starters, your character runs slower than Quake 3 on a Pentium 350. If you have hit the ball anywhere within 20 feet of a player, consider yourself out because the player will get it and throw it to first base before you get to it. Homeruns occur so rarely that it’s almost a gamble just to consider them part of the game, because they will only happen for the computer.

Then there's the Pitching area. Here it’s a bit easier. Just choose where you want the ball to go, and throw it. You can try to aim it a little away from the computer, in the hopes that they might swing and get a strike, but it isn't very often. Not to mention that the computer will never hit it to an area that is easy to fetch it. No, you must always spend 5 minutes looking for the ball and throwing it to your other players who miss it anyway, and let the computer steal two bases.

It might not be so bad if the control wasn't god-awful. When several characters are running on your batting turn at once, you can only tell one to steal! The other one sits there looking stupid. But that’s chump change compared to the hell of the pitcher's side. When a ball is hit into the air, your players must try to catch it. And there, someone had this genius idea. ''Hey! What if instead of letting us control one character, we only let him SEE one, but really let him control the entire team!'' So, when trying to catch the ball, your entire team is looking up at the sky running back while your one character, who is still too freaking slow, is trying to catch the ball, only to find out there was someone above him which you couldn't see who could’ve easily caught it. Then there's the ''fun'' of throwing the ball. You see, when a player throws it, it doesn't auto target a teammate. No, you must then maneuver one character (which is also your entire team) to try to catch it. And unless its right in front of him he won't do it. This means you can basically abandon any use for throwing there either. Overall, this makes the gameplay a steaming pile of crap.

There are about 4 tunes roughly, maybe even less. So that doesn't contribute highly to sound, seeing as how they are all pretty pointless or irritating.

The only good thing about the game (if you can call it good) is the multiplayer option. Playing against a friend irritates some of the frustration that happens when you play against a computer, because most likely your friend will be as baffled as you are about how the game works and how to do anything. Even after awhile I'm sure you will still get bored of it and move on to a REAL multiplayer game, like Tetris.

Overall, I just can't say much good about this. You can obviously see that there's a good game in there, but there is nothing to bring it out. If a few glaring errors were fixed, it could be an ok game to even a good game. The only thing that really saves this is that it was a launch game, and thus the only thing really available at the time.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 01/27/02, Updated 09/09/03