Play Old Video Games: Baseball

I'm a fan of old video games. They're both simple to play and fun, which makes them ideal for me when I'm looking for something to pick up and relieve the stress of a long work day. I suppose most "modern" people achieve this same feeling by firing up a cheap downloadable game for their cell phone, iPod, or Facebook account, but I like to go back to the originals. There's a sense of history that I enjoy alongside the games themselves and I marvel at how much was achieved with so little technologically speaking. I grew up an Apple II kid and have a warm spot in my heart for many of the programs I used and games I played as a child, but floppy disks are fragile and slow-loading. I've found that for my money, the best place to play games of that era and style today is on the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The earliest NES games date back to the years before the system even surfaced in New York City back in October 1985. Developed in Japan by the Big N itself in the early 80s, these games are the simplest of the simple and their names reflect that: Pinball, Kung Fu, Robot Block, Tennis. For the most part, they're exactly what they sound like: bare bones computerized versions of their real-world counterparts. The earliest of these is 1983's Baseball.


Looking at it today, Baseball bares little resemblance to a modern sports video game. Although there are six teams to choose from (all represented by a single letter [C = Cardinals, Y = Yankees, etc.] and a unique uniform), there are no rosters to manage or different players to learn the ins and outs of. Heck, there's not even a lot of evidence that the teams are different at all beyond the color of their uniforms. It's the game distilled down to the basics of throw ball, hit ball, field ball. No complicated control schemes to teach your friends, no dithering about who gets to be the Tigers (me, of course), just pop in the game and you're playing within 10 seconds.


It's essentially the simplest a baseball game can be and have it still look like the sport, and in my book that's a good thing. For me it hits that sweet spot of high playability and low complexity that in a lot of ways was the inspiration for the version of baseball that comes on Wii Sports. Yes, the graphics are a little blocky and move a bit slowly, but it's no wonder that the back of the box touts this game's realism no less than three times in its single paragraph of text. When compared to games from the same era on the Intellivision or Atari, the visuals and attention to detail for those who know the sport are second to none.


Just look at the cut-off man ready to keep the runner from going to third. Okay, so you can't actually throw it to the cut-off man, but he's still there, isn't he? At its core, 95% of baseball comes down to the batter/pitcher battle and that's portrayed well here. The advantage here is that you don't need to understand how a pitcher's arsenal works, nor are you restricted by what's humanly possible. You'll find no curveball, slider, changeup mechanic here. Instead, you can completely control the speed and movement of each pitch. There's nothing more satisfying than enticing your friend (or your wife, as the case may be) into swinging at a slow piece of junk that ultimately moves way off the plate.

I'll be writing every once in awhile about some of the old games that I like to play (or don't as the case may be). Whether I'm helping take you on your own trip down memory lane, inspiring you to check something out on your favorite emulator, or just blathering on self-servingly about things I like, I hope you enjoy the trip in some small way.