The World Series of Awful: Exciting Baseball (Famicom Disk System) versus Major League Baseball (NES) – Reviews

As I continue to cannibalize the aborted Baseball Games for NES/Famicom: The Definitive Review, I’ve reached the two games that were so putrid that they’re genuinely contenders for the worst video games I’ve ever played. Not sports games. Not NES games. The worst video games, period. Baseball bat wielded by Jose Canseco to my head? I’d probably say Exciting Baseball is the worst of the two and likely the very worst video game I’ve ever played in my life. Now, I didn’t go through the extra features too much, but come on. Who gives a f*ck if you can customize rosters when the actual baseball mechanics are THIS BAD?!

The tagline “no matter who wins, we lose” was already taken by Alien v Predator.

But really, both these games far exceed the lows of previous “worst NES games I’ve reviewed” like Blues Brothers, Hudson Hawk, Zoda’s Revenge: StarTropics II, Back to the Future, Defenders of Dynatron City and Cheetahmen (which I lumped together because they’re just about the most soulless, cynical games ever made), Wolverine, and the reigning kings of awful, Where’s Waldo and Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates: The Revenge of Captain Hook. The fact that not one, but two baseball games (released back-to-back nonetheless) are worse than Where’s Waldo or Peter Pan & The Pirates was almost beyond belief. The only positive thing I can say about today’s baseball games is that I genuinely don’t think I’ll ever play worse NES games. I think these will be as bad as it ever gets. It just doesn’t seem physically possible to be worse. So, I hope you enjoy this feature, because I sure as hell didn’t!

Exciting Baseball
Platform: Famicom Disk System
Released December 8, 1987
Designed by Konami
Never Released Outside of Japan
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

You can see in this picture that this routine pop fly, which had quite a bit of airtime to it (enough to count a few Mississippis before it landed) could have easily been caught by the second baseman. He could have reached out his arm and got it. At the maximum, he might have needed to take a step backwards. Now look closely at first base, because I retreated my base runners. This was a double play at second and third. I only have one out. Even though it lands outside the infield, this is still by definition an infield fly, which is one of the most misunderstood rules in the sport. The “infield” part actually refers to the PLAYER and not the location or trajectory of the fly ball. The actual definition, even in Japanese baseball, is “catchable by an infielder with ordinary effort.” There is no doubt about it that the second baseman could have moved a step back to catch that ball. This is not a nothingburger, folks. The infield fly rule exists because baseball really, really sucks without it.

The Konami “Exciting Sports” franchise got five releases in Japan for baseball, billiards, boxing, soccer, and basketball. Only one of those came out in the United States, as “Exciting Basket” is better known globally as the famous gold standard of video basketball: Double Dribble. That got me really excited, no pun intended. Double Dribble? People loved Double Dribble, right? It was the first console simulation of basketball that felt authentically like basketball. Yeah, well, I should have known there was a reason why nobody licensed a finished Famicom baseball game when the NES started picking up steam in 1988. Exciting Baseball was the first Nintendo baseball release with a competitive edge based around extra features. The big one is the ability to edit rosters. Instead of taking the expensive Nippon Professional Baseball licenses, it just created generic teams that are fully editable, right down to the team name. While it would probably take players hours and hours to fill in all the names, it also means rosters could be updated year-to-year. That should only be considered a positive if the game is fun. This is the polar opposite of fun.

This was a line drive that just landed. Balls can come to a dead stop on a dime in this game. PHYSICS!

Exciting Baseball is, simply put, a TERRIBLE game of baseball. Far worse than Nintendo’s version from years earlier and one of the worst video games I’ve ever played in my entire life. It’s bad, folks. I’m talking swinging and missing pitches, only for the umpire to call it a “ball” levels of bad. Yep, that really happened quite a lot, meaning that the hypothetical advantage of fast balls and change-ups is lost. The window to make the call isn’t long enough, so any delayed reaction to swinging (meaning not simply swinging at the wrong angle) will be called a ball instead of a strike because the umpire has a faster reaction time than the human player doing the swinging late does. I never imagined a game could get THAT part so wrong. We’re not talking about missing the infield fly rule here (though it doesn’t have that, either). A swing and a miss IS A STRIKE! If you can’t get that right, what the F*CK are you doing making a video baseball game? It happens at the end of this 29 second clip.

That by itself makes Exciting Baseball a contender for the worst sports game ever made, but I’m just getting started. The base running responsiveness will make you long for Nintendo’s 1983 game, because these players DON’T LISTEN TO YOU. If you give the run signal it could be three or four seconds before they actually start moving. This meant any shot that would be a double in any normal circumstance instead became a single, and that any fly ball I hit with runners on base was almost certain to be a double play. Well, provided it was in the outfield. Infield? That’s another story. The basemen, as far as I could tell, don’t move on defense. Additionally, CPU infielders are seemingly confused by pop flies, so stuff like this happens:

LOOK AT THAT! That was not a one off instance, either. The CPU defense will do everything in its power to give you the win. The only infielder who caught hit balls was the catcher, who ended an astonishing amount of at-bats by catching foul tips. Unlike a lot of problems in baseball video games, this wasn’t a two-way problem. I had no trouble fielding in the infield. Outfielders also occasionally get hung up, though. Like, this happened a couple times every game:

With so many terrible things going wrong, we have to start talking about Exciting Baseball as a legitimate “worst video game ever made” contender. It’s actually pretty embarrassing given the studio involved. This isn’t some nobody that threw this thing out there. It’s f*cking Konami, for God’s sake! Exciting Baseball released over a year after Castlevania. They knew how to make quality games by this point, and yet, they made a woefully inept baseball game here, and an UGLY one at that. The sprites and models are really bad. When you catch fly balls, it almost looks like you’re catching them with your ass (meaning the body part, not the fielders, though if they’re in this game they’re probably asses in the figurative sense). Then, in my second game, I got hit by over ten pitches. Here’s me getting hit by a pitch with consecutive batters in the first inning.

With the next batter, I got a base hit that should have been an out at second base but the CPU threw to third instead. The next batter after that, now with the bases juiced?

Bases Loaded Plunk.

And the batter after that?

Bases Loaded Plunk 2: The Secret of the Ooze

Base hit after that, and then I swear I’m not kidding, the ball was thrown right at my head BUT THIS TIME it went through my head. Twice.

Maybe there’s a hard cap on how many times you can be smacked by a pitch, because several more pitches went through my batter. That was fine. I ended up going up 13 to zip in the first inning, including some bases loaded walks besides the plunks. I didn’t score any runs in the second inning, and to celebrate, at the start of the third inning…… you know where this is going.

First pitch. Does the other team have money on me or something?

The fourth inning also started with getting hit on consecutive pitches. And the sixth inning. And the seventh. I mean seriously, if a game had this many bean balls, there would be a riot. Ultimately though, it feels appropriate for this game of baseball. Besides giving players a LOT of control over the curve of the ball, the pitching is too limited, and the pitcher/batting duel is too clockable. It’s a REALLY choppy game too, lacking the smooth scrolling that both RBI Baseball and Bases Loaded featured. Exciting Baseball looks and feels like a game from a previous generation console. Had this gotten an American release, I sincerely think it’d be remembered today as one of the worst sports games ever made and possibly one of the worst video games ever made. Howard Scott Warshaw should use it in defense of E.T. “Oh you think I made the worst video game ever, do you? Well at least *I* know that when you swing at a ball and miss, it’s a f*cking strike!”
Verdict: NO!

Major League Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released April, 1988
Developed by Atlus
Published by LJN
Never Released Outside of North America
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Little infield tap. Easiest play ever to first base, right? Nope. The CPU threw to third and everyone was safe. Sigh.

In the World Series of Bad Baseball Video Games, Konami’s Exciting Baseball is facing LJN’s Major League Baseball for the World Championship of Awfulness. I dare say that this game has even more problems than Konami’s retched title and it’s only by virtue of knowing that swinging and missing counts as a strike that MLB is better overall. But, it’s sadly very close, as this is yet another contender for worst video game ever made. The AI doesn’t know how to play baseball. In a baseball game! In a Major League Baseball game! The CPU doesn’t try to throw out runners who get caught trying for extra bases, so there’s no penalty at all for exploring the option. Or hell, why just let the runner make it to first base? The following tactic works every single goddamned time. Here’s me, advancing the runner from first to second after allowing a significant amount of time for the play to die down. It goes completely unchallenged:

I should have probably warned you to mute your device first. This sounds like the soundtrack for a guided tour of Hell itself.

Anyway, once you understand that the basics of the sport are the foundation of the fantasy, it doesn’t take long to understand why this is so bad. It’s IMPOSSIBLE to get immersed in Major League Baseball. It might have the team names (no player names, just numbers because it lacked the player’s union license) but nobody can suspend their disbelief and make believe that gameplay like seen in that video is authentic professional baseball players having another day on the job at the ballpark. Nobody is going to sit there and watch a guy run to second. And that’s hardly the only example. I smacked multiple catchable fly balls that the AI didn’t even move on until the ball hit the ground, and it never once attempted a double play when that was a possibility. In fairness, that’s probably because double plays don’t seem possible. Thrown balls don’t travel fast enough. For every routine double play in any normal baseball game, I converted maybe 1 out of 8. Maybe.

This is a weirdly common problem with NES/Famicom baseball games I’ve played so far: tagging the bases with the ball doesn’t cause an out. Your fielders have to tag the player directly. Weird.

It’s one of those things you never really think about: the speed of runners and thrown balls, and the dimensions of the field. These should be the things that, ideally, you wouldn’t even notice. In Major League Baseball, they’re ruinous. The traveling speed of thrown balls especially. Routine doubles? Hell, they’re triples in this game. In the time that a ball is thrown by an outfielder, you have more than enough time to round second base and make it to third before the ball even arrives in the second baseman’s glove. I did this multiple times. Amazingly, the ball kept landing in the same small handful of spots in the field so I had plenty of time to get this down to a science.

While MLB’s CPU doesn’t know how to play baseball, in fairness, it doesn’t seem to know the rules of baseball to begin with. There’s no infield flies, and fair balls are called foul. Ones that aren’t really even close calls. Like, look at this little dink along the third base line. The shadow is in. The ball lands literally right next to third base on the positive side. I’m grateful because this would have been a force out for me, but come on!

Even if you had a real life opponent, there’s no way to overcome the technical shortcomings of Major League Baseball. Base runners are too fast for ball movement this slow, thus runs are just too easy to come by, and thus games drag on without any excitement. The Pitcher/Batter duel is too limited to overcome that. From a gameplay perspective, it feels very similar to the Konami game’s set-up, only with less direct control over the curve of the ball. I gave up three home runs because there really aren’t many pitching options. 

It’s like an uglier version of RBI Baseball, isn’t it?

As for batting, in my only full game (I intended to review 40+ baseball games, but I did put at least 20 minutes practice into every game before starting the full game), I had eight home runs, including a whopping three grand slams. Hell, I even had a grand slam during the twenty-minute warm-up period. The weird thing is, graphically it looks more like RBI Baseball/Family Stadium, but in terms of gameplay Major League Baseball sure seems to build off the fundamental gameplay style of the horrible Konami game that came directly before it. It’s especially noticeable in the batting/pitching. Really, the most notable thing about MLB is that, in 1990, a 9 year old boy sued Nintendo, LJN, and the real Major League Baseball over it because it didn’t have player names and wasn’t up to date. The case was dismissed. Nobody won with Major League Baseball.
Verdict: NO!