View card Title: Exciting Baseball Genre: Sports Developer: Konami Released by: Konami Date: Decemer 8, 1987 Japanese level: 3 MSRP: 2980 yen Current Price: 500 yen

Konami's allegedly "Exciting" mid-80s sports series are for the most part pretty good, and a few of them made their way to the US. It's a good thing this one didn't, though, as this is easily one of the worst baseball games I've ever played. Crap, crap, crap! Homerun on the great Atari VCS was twenty times more fun than this.

You'd imagine that the 3rd baseball game for the Famicom would learn from some of the mistakes the first two - RBI Baseball and Bases Loaded - made, but this game makes them all and more. The main cool features involve the pennant race mode. Konami makes use of the disk and lets you play with the teams your friends made; you can even trade players with your friends. It's doubtful you would have too many friends who actually wanted this game after playing it though..

Check out that diamond screenshot. Not exactly inspiring, is it? There's the two-block guys from Bases Loaded moving jerkily, making fielding difficult. The umpire doesn't know what a high or low ball is, and calls everything that crosses home a strike. Your runners run pretty slow to start with, but when they go into a slide, they start going incredibly slowly, and usually get called out by the throw from the outfield. The computer's AI is horrible - making the outfielders field every fly ball, even those that don't leave the infield!

Konami made up for this a couple of years later with the excellent cartridge Ganbare Pennant Race, but the tears and agony that this disk left behind still lingers among the Japanese population. Please, copy this game over as soon as possible!

1999.4.20

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