Super Real Baseball ’88 (Famicom Review)

November 20, 2025 by 6 Comments

Super Real Baseball ’88
Platform: Famicom
Released July 30, 1988
Developed by Pax Softonica
Published by Vap
Never Released Outside of Japan
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The second baseman wasn’t at second base to turn this double play and I threw the ball into the outfield. This game tries SO HARD to be immersive, but it forgot to make the players, you know, know where to f*cking stand on defense!

Yep, this is an ambitious game of baseball that tries to earn the “real” in its name. Oh, it doesn’t, but I do admire the effort. I should probably note that this game comes from Pax Softonica. You might not recognize the name, but NES sports fans will recognize a game they worked on for Nintendo: Ice Hockey. Yea, the skinny/medium/fat one. That’s a really good game, as are games like the Game Boy Donkey Kong and Earthbound franchise launcher Mother for Famicom (if you’re into that sorta thing). Pax Softonica didn’t design those games but they helped build them. So Super Real Baseball comes with a legitimate pedigree. Part of me wonders if they pitched this to Nintendo and Nintendo was like “nah.” It does have the Nippon Professional Baseball license and, I assume, accurate rosters for the time period. It also is the first baseball game on the NES that feels like it’s trying to be a simulation of athletics and not a “video game.” What do I mean by that? Well, it’s an attempt at 3D gameplay where literally everything is done manually INCLUDING your batting stance.

Every batter who steps into the box already has their bat halfway through a swing and you have to manually complete the swing to take a normal stance in the two to three seconds before the pitch is thrown. This has to be done EVERY SINGLE PITCH! If you want to bunt, you just hold the A-button down without finishing the half swing you enter the batter’s box with.

Unlike other games where you just have to align a player sprite with the ball sprite and the player sprite takes possession of the ball, here, you have to press buttons to do everything. Buttons presses to pick up the ball. Button presses to throw the ball, and another button for the basemen to catch the ball. So throwing out a chopper to the shortstop requires you to (1) move towards the ball (2) press the A button when the ball is near you to catch the ball (3) hold left and press the A button to throw to first base (4) press the B button to catch the ball with the basemen. This is double the steps of any previous baseball game I’ve reviewed, which is normally just (1) move to the ball until it touches your player (2) hold left and press the throw button.

When you make a play, it sounds like an alarm. So far most of the NES baseball games I’ve reviewed have had terrible sound design, but this one is right up there with Major League Baseball in being outright annoying.

Okay, I get what they were aiming for and why they were trying it. I really do, and again, I tip my hat to them for trying to make it work. I assume the theory is that the more complicated the mechanics are, the more skill is required to master them, meaning the more it feels like a sport being played at the highest level, right? It’s not a terrible idea and, if they could have pulled it off, in theory it should enhance the immersion? Remember: sports games are fantasy games, the fantasy being you’re a real professional athlete. You’re not some lazy ass holding a game controller, or even someone pretending to be one ball player. Oh no, you’re every player having to actually work for your outs, gosh darn it! Too bad the batting is significantly easier than the fielding, so the immersion only works one-way and runs are too easy to get. In one game, I scored four runs on bean balls alone.

FOUR bases loaded plunks in a single game. Four. That’s not baseball. That’s a pitcher retiring in a blaze of glory.

But outs? THOSE you have to work for. Again, great.. if it works. It doesn’t. There’s an on-again/off-again pronounced lag between catching and throwing that I had to have my family test just to make sure it wasn’t something I was imagining. By the way, you can’t appreciate what a pain in the ass THAT was to set up. I had to wait for the ideal hit that could be thrown out, then use save states, teach them these relatively complex controls, then keep reloading the state for them to try to field the test. I did ALL of that for them to shrug and say “I dunno. Maybe?!” Thanks a ton, Fam. Very helpful.

The B-Button does this weird diving catch that has a massive delay. When the CPU hit shots that I knew damn well hadn’t bounced off the ground first, I tried using save states to catch the ball using this. Not only did it not call it an out but there was a massive delay in being able to throw. Stick to the A Button.

Super Real’s most stand-out feature is the illusion of a truly 3D game. For 1988 on the Famicom, it’s actually much more convincing than you would expect. When a batter hits the ball, the camera stays as far back towards the plate as it can while doing a television-like zoom. I had to double check with my guru Dave to make sure I understood how this was accomplished. It’s actually done using a pair of classic NES illusions: reloading an entire new screen while changing sprite sizes (pay attention to second base in the below clip) and having the background act like a matte painting. “When it ‘zooms’, it simply snaps to a different point for the camera. And the player sprites, ball and boundary action sell it,” Dave explained. Old tricks, but the classics are classics for a reason: they work, and Super Real does successfully create a sense of depth within a wide ballpark (with playfield dimensions modeled after, I kid you not, the brand spanking new-at-the-time Tokyo Dome). Take a look!

This came out before I was even born! That’s pretty dang good looking given the time frame. This is no half-assed effort, folks, and that’s why it pains me so much that nothing is fun about Super Real Baseball ’88. Defense has too steep of a learning curve. The steepest of any game baseball game I’ve reviewed so far, with nothing even close. But it wasn’t worth the effort to learn it. Even in my first game, I managed to shut out the CPU. Want to know what’s REALLY remarkable about that? I didn’t catch a single fly ball. I didn’t in the second game either, or during my warm-up. Every out I made, with the exception of one or two tags and one or two strikeouts was a force-out at bases. There were some infield “catches” that sure seemed like they should have been a fly out that weren’t. Here’s my first ever fly ball catch, all the way in the bottom of the 5th in the third game I played.

Same game where I’ve scored four total runs from getting hit by a pitch with the bases loaded.

How did I do it? You have to hold the button down. That.. makes sense, actually and I’m not sure how it took me three games to figure that out. Unlike the pitching, which is most certainly not intuitive. The normal D-pad assignments of “hold towards the plate for a fastball, away from the plate for a change up, or side-to-side for breaking balls” applies. But, in Super Real Baseball, you have to also tap the button while throwing the pitch. Do it too little and the ball will be low. Do it too much and you’ll throw too high. Again, their heart was in the right place and I appreciate that they didn’t just want players wiggling the D-pad. It just wanted to do too much for an NES game. I imagine this was probably better at the time it came out, but there’s also a reason why Super Real Baseball was one and done. It just doesn’t make for a fun game. For all its complexity, I had it clocked enough to win the third game 26 to nothing while holding the computer to only six hits. I respect ambition, but ambition isn’t fun all by itself.
Verdict: NO!

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R.B.I. Baseball aka Pro Baseball: Family Stadium (NES Review)

October 9, 2025 by 5 Comments

R.B.I. Baseball
aka Pro Baseball: Family Stadium
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom
First Released December 10, 1986
Designed by Yoshihiro Kishimoto
Developed by Namco
Published in North America by Tengen
NO MODERN RELEASE (?)
Licenses: Major League Baseball Player’s Association

If you have a runner on third in a non-bases-loaded situation, you can EASILY turn what should be routine outs into hits. Runners go automatically in RBI Baseball for any contact with the ball, even obvious pop flies. But if it’s a short hit into the infield, the CPU will throw to home for the tag out the runner heading for home plate. If you turn the third base runner back to third, the catcher will try to chase you down instead of throwing you out, allowing the batter to reach first.

If my verdicts were based on historical significance, R.B.I. Baseball’s YES! would be as easy to award as a game like Super Mario Bros. or Legend of Zelda. There’s a reason this spawned a tentpole franchise that lives on to this day, at least in Japan. In 1986, if you had a home console, there were only two games to compare it to. Nintendo’s 1983 Baseball and the 1985 Sega Mark III game Great Baseball that had a nearly identical gameplay concept to Nintendo’s Baseball, only with significantly less personality (the US version of Great Baseball would add a picture/batter duel similar to Bases Loaded but that didn’t come out until after Famista). These weren’t alone, as Hardball on the C64 and World Series Baseball for Intellivision also tried to build around the pitcher/batter duel. None of those games felt like they got enough of the core basics right. Family Stadium/R.B.I. Baseball mostly does.

Not trying for realistic graphics certainly freed the developers to focus on what was important.

Family Stadium’s pitcher/batter duel dynamic that uses a split screen to show first and third base was revolutionary. Okay, so the characters all look very cartoony, but the gameplay is unmistakably compelling. There’s a sense of depth that’s impressive for the time period. Unlike Nintendo’s Baseball, you have to do more than just get the ball over the plate on a pitch. Balls can also be called if a pitch is below the strike zone. Okay, so it’s not THAT complex. It’s either strike or it rolls across the plate with no middle ground as far as I could tell, but hey, they were getting there. You can even substitute pitchers, as well. Batting is even better, as there’s a lot of room in the batter’s box, with a nice PING to connected swings. Initially, I thought home runs were too easy to come by as I blasted four long balls in my first ever full game. But then the next two games, I didn’t hit a single one. Actually, it was kind of five home runs in that first game because this happened:

Yeah, time for the bad news: for as big a leap forward as R.B.I. Baseball makes, it’s also highly exploitable and pretty janky. For whatever reason, the CPU fielder there simply could not pick up the ball and didn’t attempt another angle. Since the ball isn’t touching the wall, I assume the fielder is just not programmed to take any route but the closest line, only the angle of the wall prevented him from being able to reach it and he got caught in a chase cycle (a fan on Facebook confirmed this happens enough to be a known glitch, along with another janky thing I never witnessed). For what it’s worth, I hit a dinger with the next batter, so those bases were getting cleared either way. At least that glitch only happened once. More problematic was that it only took me halfway through the first game to clock the batting. Over the course of three games, I hit twenty-nine doubles and a whopping fourteen triples. FOURTEEN! Only one of those fourteen felt like it would have been a real life triple. The reason is simple: the base runners are too fast while fielders and their throws are too slow.

What you’re seeing right here is an error, which happens at random. It never happened to me but it happened at least once a game to my opponents. The first time it happened I didn’t realize it COULD happen and rounded first base during the fly ball, so even though the guy dropped it, he picked me off at second.

So R.B.I. Baseball is unmistakably baseball, but it’s not INTELLIGENT baseball. Things like every runner going on every hit is especially annoying because you have to manually retreat them. But, once I got a feel for it and realized what an enormous advantage the runners had, I won the next two games via mercy. Hell, the second game ended in the fifth inning. After I got the hang of pitching and proper defense (I allowed a lot of hits off what I think were likely playable fly balls) well, there was nothing left for R.B.I. Baseball to offer me. The last game was a shut out. In only three games, I knew how to cheese the offense to the point that I don’t think I could lose a game of this. I could see how Family Stadium was a big deal in 1986. No doubt about it, this is the foundation for video baseball from here on. The measuring stick, at least until the polygon era. But once you know how to really play R.B.I. Baseball, it’s too easy. At least now I’m genuinely excited for the rest of the Famista franchise.
Verdict: NO!
Final Score 1 (US): Cathy 15, CPU 7 (Home Runs: Cathy 4, CPU 3) BOX SCORE
Final Score 2 (US): Cathy 21, CPU 5 – Mercy Called in the 5th (Home Runs: Cathy 0, CPU 3) BOX SCORE
Final Score 3 (JP): Cathy 15, CPU 0 – Mercy Called in the 7th (Home Runs: Cathy 2, CPU 0) BOX SCORE

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Baseball (NES Review) Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball (Switch Review)

August 30, 2025 by 6 Comments

Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom
Released December 7, 1983
Designed by Shigeru Miyamoto
Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)

Arcade Archives: Vs. Baseball
Platform: Nintendo Switch
Original Platform: Arcade
Released June 19, 2020
Arcade Release: April, 1984
Originally Developed by Nintendo
Re-Release Published by Hamster
$7.99 struck out in the making of this review.

No infield fly rule. That’s just peachy.

“Seriously, Cathy?” Yep, seriously. Hey, I’m sporty! And by that I mean I watch sports. Play? Hah. I actually had to stop and think if I’ve even run once in the entire 21st century. Running? That sh*t looks positively exhausting! I used to golf. You know, the sport where you’re allowed to bypass the overwhelming majority of the “moving around” part of the game and instead drive a motorized carriage right up to the ball. Or, if you’re especially lazy, pay someone to drive the cart for you (thumbs up). Really, I’m only doing Nintendo’s 1983 baseball game because it was designed by Big Shiggy Style and it’s probably his worst game ever. I mean, it has to be, right? I’ve heard people say Baseball was good for its time. Was it, though? I wouldn’t be born for another five-and-a-half years after it came out so I’m just guessing over here, but I can’t imagine people in 1983 would be fine with how this plays. This is pretty frick’n horrendous.

Exclusively on the coin-op, the defense changes camera angles. The NES/Famicom version doesn’t do this. BTW, this is the only game I won of Vs. Baseball. Every time I scored a run, the next batter the CPU got immediately hit a dinger on the first playable pitch I gave. Okay, not every time but it felt like it.

The one thing that kinda, sorta feels okay..ish? The batting. It’s fine, really! I’m guessing the majority of video baseball games from the golden age focused on batting, and I could see how maybe in 1983, this felt like a close approximation of America’s pastime. You can scoot around the batter’s box and there’s a nice crack when you make contact. It feels appropriately impactful. So, that’s nice. Nothing else is even in the ballpark, though. Like base running? The AI runners are woefully stupid and heavily unresponsive. See these two screenshots where I got what should be an extra bases hit? Well, for whatever reason, even after the ball hit the ground, the runners tagged back to the bases during a live ball then sat there and stared like dumb sh*ts while the fielder limped to the ball, ignoring my “RUN MOTHER F*CKERS!” command that I was giving the entire time. What should have scored the runner on second base ended up instead being a double play for the other team. If players pulled that sh*t in real life, any manger would have rushed the field and murdered them with a bat. No jury would convict them.

Another example of the brain dead base running: if there’s a man on first and second and the batter hits a ball that IMMEDIATELY touches the ground in front of home plate, the runners will tag-up before running. This is a force-out situation, so why the goddamn f*ck is the first instinct of the runners to tag-up before they start to run to the next base? It’s not humanly possible to react fast enough to give the command not to do this. This is basic, BASIC baseball stuff that has to work every single time, and it doesn’t. I don’t even know why they bothered with running controls because, half the time, the runners don’t listen. They certainly don’t when it comes to sending them to specific bases. They seemed more likely to listen when I gave the “all runners advance” sign. Even then, OBVIOUS ROUTINE doubles and even triples were ignored by the base runners, or even worse: they’d literally run the other way, back to the base they were on and tag up first. Mother f*cker, it’s a base hit! RUN! Little kids playing tee-ball aren’t this inept at the sport! By the way, the CPU opponent’s runners DO NOT have this base running problem. They know when it’s safe to run. That proves it can be done, even in 1983.

There’s no cap on the amount of times the CPU can attempt to pick-off a guy on base, even if you’re not doing anything. I literally pressed no buttons, but it’s baseball and guys step off the base. You would think the arcade game would have a peppier speed, but actually, I think Vs. Baseball tries to pick off runners even more. How many times in a row? I counted nine consecutive attempts four separate times. That’s nine times where not a single button was pressed but the CPU did something besides throw the next pitch. You know Hamster, maybe you shouldn’t have included the five minute caravan mode. It’s not really suitable for it.

What’s with the points you see on the Vs. Baseball screenshots? It’s how the game decides when a player needs to pay to continue. You don’t get a full game per quarter, but instead of having you pay every three innings (which would make sense) every single action in the game (except an attempt at a pick-off) eats up points, on both offense and defense. Are you playing defense and throwing a ball to a base to prevent advancement? That’ll cost you points. On offense and swinging the bat? That takes points too. Foul balls? Yep, both offensively and defensively. So does running the bases, while you get 30 points back for scoring a runner. Then again, you lose a lot more than 30 points when the other team hits a bomb out of the park. I gave up a two-run homer and it deducted 90 points.

There’s no license but the uniforms actually match the colors of six MLB teams (NES) or six Japanese baseball teams (Famicom), including the Chunichi Dragons, who I recognize from Mr. Baseball, a genuinely underrated sports film. If you can find it, check it out. The funny thing is, I don’t LOVE baseball (it’s fine) but I love baseball movies. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve told people that the ending of A League of Their Own makes zero sense. The climatic game, I mean. There’s two outs, two on, and up to the plate steps Dotty Henson, the best hitter in the league. Yeah, she gets walked. 100% of the time, especially since the Peaches’ second best hitter, Marla Hooch, got married and didn’t play in the post season. They needed to create a situation where Dotty’s sister Kit, the plucky pitcher who got traded from the Peaches, almost gave up the game to her sister. But having Dotty blast an empty-bases homer would have been better than what they actually did, because what they wrote, simply put, would NEVER HAPPEN! Dotty would never ever ever get pitched to in that situation. They would have juiced the bases to create a force-out situation at every corner. I might have wrote this review just to have an excuse to talk about that on my blog.

If you were playing this on a real cabinet, it would take about a dollar to finish, and after a certain benchmark, the points go away and it lets you finish the game. To put it in perspective how STUPID this system is, right before going to press I played one last game using Arcade Archives’ Hi-Score mode (default settings, no pausing allowed, cheating impossible). On the literal first pitch I was given, I hit an inside-the-park home run. I might have scored a run, but I still had less points (238) than I started with (250) when the first batter stepped up to the plate. Dumb.

Note: In this clip of the inside-the-park homer, you can also see the lengthy pauses at each base. I’m LITERALLY giving the go sign the entire time. The runner should never have stopped! I was waving them forward right from the start!

While the base running and unresponsiveness is enough to assure a NO! by itself, the defense would have earned it too. All the fielding is done automatically. All you have to do is throw the ball. That’s fine with me, actually. I did the same thing when I played Ken Griffey Slugfest on my N64 as a kid. But, because the field is built to scale, the fielders run like they have each foot caught in a bear trap. Okay, I get it. They’re trying to simulate their approximate location if it were a full-sized baseball diamond. I’d be fine with that if the defense was reliable. It’s not. The defense’s judgement in general is pretty bad, so even something as routine as a pop fly could be dropped. The foul line is especially dangerous, as players often have to move up and and down to line up with the ball. This is where the slow speed of the fielding really screws you. However, unlike base running, this one works both ways. The CPU drops fly balls all the time too, and when it happens, it’s almost like they lose track of where the ball is in the sky. At least the pitching is fine. There’s four pitches, all controlled with the d-pad, though I couldn’t get screwballs across the plate. I’d prefer a little more room to mess with the ball, but eh, the base running is what kills Baseball. The runners are constantly tagging-up when they don’t need to, and there is literally no basis for this in baseball. I’ve never seen any game at any level that looks like this. They could have done better, even in 1983.

For whatever reason, I hit a LOT more home runs in Vs. Baseball than I did standard NES/Famicom Baseball.

Okay, so this review MIGHT seem silly to have done. But $7.99 is not an insignificant amount of money. You can buy a LOT of games for under $8 on the eShop these days. If Hamster had bundled it with Tennis, Soccer, and maybe even Golf, that would be one thing. $8 for THIS? And one of the special modes doesn’t REALLY work because the CPU might guzzle most of the five minutes trying to catch a runner stealing. You can’t stop the runners from getting leads, so there’s really no way to prevent getting caught in an agonizing cycle of pick off attempts. Both it and hi-score mode are certainly luck-based. It’s kind of nauseating. I know that the real goal with Baseball was simply to look and play better than any home video baseball did in 1983. Okay, MAYBE mission accomplished there. For that reason, some would say it’s unfair to call this Miyamoto’s worst game. It’s not an invalid argument. And for what it’s worth, I’m not calling this Nintendo’s worst game. The batting works fine. That raises it just out of the WOAT discussion all by itself. I’d rather play THIS than Ice Climber.

In Vs. Baseball, getting beaned is labeled “DEAD.” Jeez, how hard was that ball thrown? Only one person has ever been killed by getting hit by a pitch in major league history. His name was Ray Chapman. I can’t believe I know that guy’s name off the top of my head but I can’t tell you any of my nieces or nephew’s middle names.

The only reason I think Baseball is fair game in the “worst Nintendo game” discussion is because Nintendo keeps re-releasing it, which is a constant reminder that this is a BAD game of video baseball. Slow. Unresponsive. The behavior from the CPU fielding or base running doesn’t resemble what you expect from people who are in baseball uniforms. That’s what kills it for me. I might have joked about it earlier, but all my longtime readers know I legitimately love sports. The reason is simple: I love seeing athletes compete at the highest level. For whatever reason, it captures my imagination. That’s why, for me to really enjoy video sports, I need the fundamentals perfect. The GAME doesn’t have to be perfect, but the basics do. There’s no fantasy without that. No immersion. With Nintendo’s famous Baseball? I can’t suspend my disbelief, unless I’m pretending this is a celebrity softball game played with a three drink minimum. Hell, even then I think the players ought to be able to tell the difference between a line drive base hit and a pop fly.
Verdict: NO! and NO!

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What I’m Playing #22 – The Famicom Tetris Review

November 18, 2024 by 2 Comments

It was a 58 year old man whose best days were decades behind him against a 27 year old in the prime of his athletic life. What did people think would happen? I was born in 1989, and so by the time I was watching and remembering boxing, I had to go off my dad’s word that Mike Tyson was a generational talent. I never got to see it until years after the fact. My father is a huge boxing fan who ordered all the fights on pay-per-view, and he was HYPED for Tyson/Holyfield. As a young child, I thought Tyson seemed like much ado about nothing. I was a couple weeks away from turning 8 years old when the infamous “Bite Fight” against Evander Holyfield happened. I liked Holyfield as a kid. Him and Lennox Lewis were my favorites. I got hooked on boxing during the original Tyson/Holyfield fight, which did live up to the hype and was an exciting fight, at least for a 7 year old. The whole time my dad was saying “it’s too bad this didn’t happen in 1990!” But it didn’t, and even by 1997, almost everything about Mike Tyson that made him a boxing phenom was already gone. He was a good, but not great, tactician with a good chin, but he didn’t have the explosiveness that made him famous to begin with. I missed that stage of his career entirely. So, even as a kid, I didn’t “get” Tyson. To me, he was just another cooked boxer, like George Foreman.

I didn’t see the guy who was annihilating guys in the first round. I didn’t see the guy who won his first 37 matches. There’s a reason why the Buster Douglas loss was so shocking. It was unfathomable a guy on his level would lose to a guy on Douglas’ level. It’s not one of those situations where people look back on and say “well, it was inevitable.” It feels like if you replayed reality 100,000 times, we live in the one and only reality where Douglas actually won. If you need proof that it didn’t feel inevitable, just remember that Tyson himself beat a guy who was 21 – 0 to become Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion, and that, by all accounts, had an inevitability about it. Not Tyson, though. He was legit, and so amazing as a boxer that I don’t think the sport ever recovered from him. Tyson was one of those athletes who, when it was over, it was REALLY over. He had matches that ended on stoppages after committing fouls. He was disqualified after the fact against Andrew Golta for failing a drug test. No, not steroids. Weed. Which is only a performance enhancing drug if the winner gets a bowl full of cookie dough. A month before I turned 16, Tyson had his final bout against a guy named Kevin McBride. McBride was seemingly chosen because he was exactly the type of journeyman Tyson had plowed through in the twenty or so fights he had before he became the world heavyweight champion. It’s the type of match an aging boxer takes as a confidence booster, except that’s not what happened. McBride completely tuned Tyson, who didn’t just quit the match in the sixth round, but retired from boxing altogether. In the 19 years that followed, apparently people forgot that, in his final professional match, Tyson was literally beaten into an on-the-spot retirement by a nobody.

Anyone who was excited to see Mike Tyson fight nearly twenty years after he retired apparently forgot that everything after 1997 from Mike Tyson was just kind of sad. I know, because that was the only version of Mike Tyson I ever got to see. Having now found and watched his old fights, I get it now. There has never been a combination of speed and power like Mike Tyson. As a fighter, he was a one-off. Most people don’t know this, but there’s a reason why in Mike’s Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, for the first minute and a half of the Tyson match, one punch knocks you down. Because Tyson legitimately did knock down fighters with one punch in multiple bouts in 1985 and 1986. He even won a few of those matches with one punch! Imagine paying good money to see a match that lasted one round, and everyone walks away happy. That would never happen now, but that was Tyson early in his career. Why would people be happy to see a one round fight? Because everyone left with the impression that they had seen a type of fighter they would never see again, and they were right. Being cooked with no “post-prime” isn’t exclusive to boxing. Some of my favorite basketball players were that way. Steve Nash, Allen Iverson, Boogie Cousins, Dwight Howard, (some might disagree with me on that one) and most recently Derrick Rose, when it was over, it WAS OVER. They might have still been technically playing, but what stuck around was a shell that made you wish they’d turn back the clock for one vintage performance that would never come. Sports are cruel like that. In a way, I’m happy Netflix didn’t cooperate on Friday. If a vintage Tyson performance never happened when I was 8, why would I expect it at 35?

So, what AM I playing? Like you even need to ask. Here’s a preview of the upcoming Tetris Forever review: the full review of the Famicom version of Tetris. This is directly from the feature.

Tetris
aka “Famicom Tetris”
Platform: Famicom
Released December 22, 1988
Programmed by Bob Rutherford
Developed by Bullet-Proof Software
Never Released Outside of Japan

Dynamic scoring! WOOO! And.. lives? What the f*ck?

The first ever console version of Tetris is also one of the weirdest builds of Tetris I’ve ever played. First thing’s first: I love how Digital Eclipse felt compelled to put a warning that the controls are so stupid that players will want to change them. It doesn’t say it like that, but it’s not wrong. In this Tetris, pressing DOWN rotates the blocks, while the buttons do hard drops. I assume they did it this way because people hit DOWN accidentally. I sure have, but I’d prefer doing that sometimes to how the controls are set up. It’s worse because the only remapping is via the emulator itself, and while it is an option, remember that changing what button is the hard drop means that new button, presumably DOWN, is now “enter” for the menus, and now you can only scroll one way when you enter your name. So awkward, but the weirdness of Famicom Tetris is just getting started.

Dad called this “Christmas Tetris” because of the color scheme.

So yes, dynamic scoring is here and players FINALLY have some measure of risk/reward to deal with instead of just stacking for efficiency. But, there’s a catch: this Tetris is played in 25 line intervals. There’s no uninterrupted marathon mode, and also I might have a concussion for banging my head on the desk. It’s honestly incredible how many versions of this game needed to happen before the Tetris we all love emerged. I’m six games into this feature, five of which are Tetris games, and I’ve still not reached a Tetris that feels like my Tetris. And the weirdness keeps coming in the form of lives. You get to fail three times, and when you die, you still get all the points you earned for this 25-line interval, but then you restart with a new 25 line target. You also don’t get to know how well you’re doing until the breaks, as the score isn’t tallied until you die or reach 25 lines. It’s like Game Boy Tetris’ B-Mode as a solo game.

My motto of “find the fun” took a little longer with Famicom Tetris. The 25 line or bust gameplay engine put up a fight. But then I realized, screw it, embrace it by jacking up the handicap to the max. And lo, the fun was found.

Not strange enough for you? If you play with handicap and clear 25 lines, whatever progress you’ve made is retained for the next 25 line batch. But if you die, you start from scratch with a fresh pile of garbage blocks on the playfield. I don’t recommend playing on level 0, as it’s just not fun. Even if you use handicap, start on at least level 5 for speed. This is one of the rare Tetris games where the garbage blocks are the best part of the game. Without a marathon and a much slower sense of progression, challenging tall stacks of garbage is the best thing Famicom Tetris has going for it. What stood out to me the most about Famicom Tetris is how everyone involved still had no idea what they had with Tetris. I appreciate that they realized what they were doing, and what Spectrum Holobyte had done, was certainly not maximizing its potential. This was a big step, and while they had a ways to go, I did manage to “find the fun” by treating this as a hybrid of a logic puzzler and Tetris. BUT, if you just hate the Game Boy Tetris’ B-Mode, feel free to imagine this verdict flipped.
Verdict: YES! – $2 in Value added to Tetris Forever

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