This holiday season particularly I've noticed a lot of people on facebook feeds have been playing video games. Mainly because the Playstation 3 and XBox 360 users are piggy-backing the Nintendo Wii's self-motion activated games with their own versions. The PS3 has the "Move" which you hold wands (one or two) to play different kinds of games and the XBox "Kinect" allows you to have full-motion games without holding anything like it's counterparts, Wii and PS3.I've had a chance to play both, my buddy Mark had a PlayStation "Move." I played a couple of rounds of disc golf and some sort of sword fighting game with a shield. The realism of movement is astounding. I'm spending Christmas with my fiance and future in-laws in Andrews, Texas. Her brother got the XBox Kinect and we've all had a lot of fun playing it. He has a sports game and we've taken part in Boxing and Track & Field as well as some sort of adventure game. Kinect is a little harder for me because the sensor has trouble picking up my entire 6-9 frame, but it's been fun nonetheless.
Obviously, this is the first round of all these motion-related games, and much like we saw the original Atari and Nintendo systems, things can only go up from here. So, before one day we put on a head set and actually are able to step into a virtual stadium to play Madden or MLB the Show, I'm going to take this time rate my favorite sports games of all time by generation (Nintendo era, Sega Genesis Era, Play Station era, etc.), and I'll do it by category. Today's category, baseball.
Now, I'll say this, it took my parents a long time to come around on the whole video game thing - I wasn't able to have a console in my house until I was 12 years old. So I moved pretty quickly from Nintendo to Sega Genesis. The other thing about that is, once I was able to have a console, we weren't able to have a whole lot of games, we played what we had, and maybe got one or two games a year for the first couple of years. All this to say, though I went to friends' house that had games, likely in the early console generations, my favorites will be what games I had.
However, my favorite baseball game from the "original" consoles - which I consider to be the Nintendo Entertainment System was in fact, a game I didn't own.
And the winner is ...
Original Console Bracket
Little League Baseball Championship Series
Many will fall into the "RBI" Baseball category. While I enjoyed RBI baseball, the Little League game was the most advanced of all the original console games. In RBI, the fielders would move simultaneously to your directional pad movement. Starting pitcher fatigue was extremely inaccurate, and I found the replay value to be small. The greatness of the Little League game was its attempt at accurate gameplay. You had to warm up pitchers, substitutions were key throughout the game, and unless you were really bad, you generally ended up with fairly realistic baseball scores. I never owned this game, my friends Cody and Kyle Blair had it, and I remember often going to their house just to play the Little League Game.Some people liked the "Bases Loaded" series, I never got into it. "Baseball Stars" was a great game, but I only played it a time or two, and couldn't give it proper due.
Honorable Mention:
RBI Baseball
The Early Console Era (Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo) Baseball Winner is ...
Ken Griffey Jr Baseball (SNES)
As I will mention later in this post, I'm pretty sure that if forced to make a decision on my favorite baseball video game of all-time, I'd go with Griffey. While it had some major flaws, mainly the no-bounce throws from the outfield and infielders four times as fast as baserunners, Griffey still somehow managed to produce the most realistic baseball numbers of all-time if you played a season. In college I had a 989 Sports Baseball Game for the GameCube with Chipper Jones on the cover where it was very possible to hit 200 homeruns in a season with one player. Griffey was ahead of its time. It accomplished something that MLB The Show has achieved but 20 years later. The ability to have game play where you feel like you have a reasonable amount of control, but yet can't put up arcade style numbers.I had a Sega Genesis, but one of my better friends in late elementary school and middle school had the SNES and we had epic battles in Griffey. Any weekend we spent at his house generally revolved around Griffey or EA Sports' "NBA Showdown." My adolescent love for the Braves also translated to Griffey, because at the time they were a power house when Griffey came out. My favorite batter was Ron Gant and my favorite pitcher was Tom Glavine. But of course, Griffey fans know, that if you wanted names like Glavine and Gant to show up, you had to look up all the rosters and add the names manually as the game didn't gave the MLBPA license. However, coincidentally all the players' performances on the lineup with "fake" names had the correct jersey numbers, player builds and "realistic" facial features of the true MLB counterparts.
Never has there been a game where a 1-0 finish was so much fun. You could play a nine-inning game in 20-25 minutes and pitching duels were as much fun as trying to hit monstrous homeruns, which were measured by the game. A great feature, which I believe was the first of its kind when your player crossed the plate after a homer you could see and hope for a 500-foot bomb.
Honorable Mention: World Series Baseball '95 (Sega Genesis)
Since I owned a Genesis, the baseball game I played the most on this console was "World Series Baseball '95." This was more of an arcade-style game, but I absolutely loved it and played multiple seasons all the way through. While I could hit 80 or 90 home runs a season with my favorite player Ron Gant, what I loved most about it was the ability to strike out multitudes of hitters with the pitching staff. The other feature I remembered about World Series Baseball was it was the first game I owned/played where you actually had to "warm up" the pitcher rather than just be able to put them in. You had to wait until a pitcher was warm or otherwise your reliever was likely to get rocked. This obviously added strategy to know when your starter had just enough to get through a couple of hitters before bringing in relief.My favorite memory about this game looking back, although I was mad as hell at the time, was when my dad made me turn the game off in the middle of a perfect game attempt. I had a friend over and I was playing in my season with the Braves. I had Steve Avery on the mound and through six innings I had 16 of the 18 outs struck out. My dad needed to take us to run an errand, and not sure what his deal was, but he wouldn't allow me to leave the game on while we were gone. Don't know if he thought if I left it on it would run up his electricity bill or if he was just trying to make a point. I was devastated, and my friend was pretty upset too. I never threw a no-hitter as long as I had that game, and I'll never know if that was my only chance ...
Honorable Mention #2 - Triple Play Gold (Sega Genesis):
Great EA Sports effort, and I put it on here, because I owned it, and although it was flawed, Triple Play Gold was the first game I had that you could create a player. Although, there wasn't much "creation" to do. You could make a player's name, number, some few physical attributes, however, you had no control over the player's skill rating. So when I create a player named Kyle Robarts and his rating was only a 78, it stunk. But then, you could go re-create a player with the same name and he'd come out an 85.
Mid-Generation Console (PlayStation, Nintendo 64) Winner is ...
Triple Play 99 (PS1)
This will be my weakest section as I only owned a PlayStation for a short time before transferring to Dreamcast, before transferring to the original XBox. In fact, I believe on this generation of console that Triple Play '99 was the only game I owned. Honestly the only thing I remember about this game were two things. One, and least important was that it was incredibly hard to strike out computer hitters. I believe the most I ever had in a game was nine with Randy Johnson in the days where if he didn't reach 10 strikeouts in reality, it was a disappointment. However, the great thing about Triple Play '99 was that I started a long-standing tradition with baseball games where you could fully customize and create players. So I always started creating my friends, putting them all on rosters and playing entire seasons (or two) with them. I still create my teams to this day, and likely many of the same players are still on the teams.Honorable Mention: N/A
Last Generation Console (PS2, XBox, Dreamcast):
MVP 2005 (XBox)
This one was simple because the XBOX 360's and PS3's came so quickly after I got an XBox that there were really only two baseball games that I owned (except for my brief Dreamcast phase and a disaster of a Sega Baseball game), and they were built on the same engine. The winner is MVP 2005. EA Sports' best effort after overhauling the Triple Play series. If they had stayed closer to this engine, they may have been able to stay in the baseball business. I literally played 2.5 seasons through a franchise of 162-game seasons with MVP. It played well, numbers were decently realistic while Barry Bonds' 72-homer mark was always an achievable goal with your top hitter. The "Hitter's Eye" was a nice touch if you were quick enough. For those who loved building the farm system and the whole "GM" experience while playing games, this was innovative.
Honorable Mention:
MVP 06: NCAA Baseball (XBox)
For some reason, EA Sports dropped its MLB "MVP" game and switched it to college. While this ticked off the bulk of the baseball-gamer audience, at that time in life for me, I loved it. I had two roommates who played college baseball, which in turn led me to hang out and make great friends with a lot of the baseball players from my alma mater. With my roommates' lives being engulfed by college baseball, and I happened to work for our athletic department requiring me to be at all their games, a college baseball video game was a welcome substitute for my yearly MLB game. Other than the new college feel to the game, my roommate and I battled in the two-person homerun challenge, which was timed and basically a test of who could time their swing the best the most amount of times consecutively. I'm a recruiting feen in college football games, and while the baseball game wasn't as easy or fluid to recruit I still enjoyed building a baseball program.
Current Generation (PS3, XBox 360, Wii) - the winner is ...
MLB The Show '09
After having an Xbox 360 for more than two years, I sold my console and my entire game library to buy a PS3 for one purpose: to buy MLB The Show '09. Other than some loading woes, XBox 360 was great, however, it lacked a version of a baseball game that claimed to be the most realistic baseball game ever. I played '08 a couple of times at friends houses and was blown away by everything. The fact that there were innings where you could hit three ground balls in a row for outs; line-drive hits; and the pitching system just worked. The Blue-Ray player and free online play was also a good reason to switch. Anyway, I made this move about the time that The Show '09 was released and I played the crap out of it and still do. In fact, I waited a little bit when the latest version of '10 came out this past year to see what gamers were saying about the new game. Honestly, I'm at a time in life where if I'm still enjoying a game, I don't necessarily need to buy the newest one. I began doing that with Madden and College Football a few years ago. Unless I read that I absolutely have to have the new one for many added features, or a glaring bug in the version that I hold has been fixed by the new version, I'll keep it. This was the case for '09, in fact many of the reviews I read said that '09 was an overall better effort than '10. And because I was into about year four of my franchise, I wanted to keep going. So I played about another year and a half this baseball season on MLB The Show '09. Likely, I'll take in the MLB The Show '11 when it comes out to spice it up, but I think forevermore, '09 will be one of the greatest baseball games of all time.Honorable Mention: Major League Baseball 2k9 (XBox 360)
I hesitate to put this one on there because basically my frustration with this slow-pitch softball like game was the reason I sold my XBOX 360, games and bought a PS3. However, my favorite thing about MLB 2K9 was the innovative pitching techniques in which you had to move your thumbs on the joysticks certain ways to throw different kinds of pitches. This added to me the realism of pitcher's "mistakes." Which, obviously, sometimes the ball slips out of a pitcher's hand funny, or they are unable to hit their spots leaving pitches out over the plate and vulnerable to even 9-hole hitters to hit balls out of the park. The pitching system alone allows it on the honorable mention list. The hitting was terrible, it was either a ground ball hit or a home run. Line drives were rare, and the game scores were ridiculous with 10-12 home runs being hit for a user player.- - -
Now that you know my favorite baseball games by generation of console, my top two games of all-time are:
1) Ken Griffey, Jr. Baseball (SNES)
2) MLB The Show '09 (PS3)
I'll do basketball next, and I'll post my next post when I post my next post.
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