Baseball
Year: 1985
Rating: E
Time Played: 30 minutes / 0.5 hours
Recently, I’ve been filling out my collection of NES games and added the classic Baseball for a few bucks from a used game shop. I hadn’t actually played this specific game growing up, having instead experienced the Baseball game Nintendo released for the Game Boy. Having a free evening one night, I got the cartridge cleaned up and running on my NES so I could play a round. While not considered one of the “standards” of the system, Baseball still shows the quality content Nintendo released with their first home console. Even with the limited graphical quality of the NES, Baseball uses what it needs to convey the game simply and efficiently.
I’m sure Baseball plays differently in 2-player mode against another human, but the brief nine innings I experienced against the AI were enjoyable. Never did I feel the computer player was unfair in its fielding or batting. Similarly, I enjoyed the amount of freedom I could exhibit in fielding and pitching—the latter of which had quite a few pitch options to choose from. Perhaps my previous experience playing on the Game Boy allowed me to understand the controls right off the bat (har har), but the buttons seemed intuitive to control both sides of the game.
What Baseball is potentially missing in its brevity is the pull to continue playing after finishing a nine-inning round. If I had lost, I might have considered a rematch to see if I could beat the computer. As it was, there wasn’t much to incentivize me to play again once I got through a single game. Perhaps if there was a tournament mode, I would have played for a few hours instead of the brief 30 minutes it took to get through all nine innings.
A great pick-up-and-play classic from Nintendo’s early days, I give Baseball 4.0 stars out of 5.
