Baseball Stars

Review by Loc

Easily one of the most underrated sports games ever, our next review focusing on the NES classis: Baseball Stars. I guess in keeping with the early theme of showcasing the best games you never played, Baseball Stars has to be one of the all-time underdogs. Put succinctly, if this ever ends up on Wii Virtual Console, I might disappear for a couple weeks playing that bad boy.

So what makes Baseball Stars stand out from all the other contenders? After all, we've all heard of Bases Loaded, that one was way more popular right? Sure, but Baseball Stars had the one thing that games of the era failed to comprehend: general manager abilities! Whereas most sports games focused on the in-game interactions, Baseball Stars did them one better by also providing a means to create your own fantasy super teams. This was fantasy baseball before the internet.

How did the game pull it off? A couple of great innovations. First, you could create up a whole new team. Granted, the computer gave you a nice mix of average to above-average players, but you had complete control of their destinies. You renamed everyone, you gave them uniforms, and you set the line-ups. Simple enough.

Ah, but there was more. Every player had defined attributes including hitting, power, speed, and defense for batters, or stamina, right and left curves, and drop for pitchers. Now here's where Baseball Stars took things to a new level: these attributes could be powered up. BUT, every player had a "max" rating, meaning you had to be strategic in how you filled their categories. AND, to fill these categories you had to spend money you earned from playing games. Not just playing games, you had to win the games to earn money. AND each player had a salary, so that's how much it would cost to power them up. MOST IMPORTANTLY, every time you spent to power up a player, their resulting rise in ability would lead to a higher salary.

It's not like you needed to be a salary cap guru to figure this out, it just goes to show there were layers of complexity in this interface. Thus, you had to choose whether you really wanted to power up your best veteran player, when he had a "max" level of 67 but the most power on your team, or if you would invest in the young rookie who had great potential with a "max" 79, but had no current skills. Ahh, it was good times pretending to be a Moneyball genius before Moneyball existed.

One of the sweetest goals you could strive for was signing the "top" free agent. This guy had a "max" of 90, meaning you could fill up every single category to its maximum potential. This guy also cost $3 million dollars to sign, and still only had like 75 points assigned to him. So you'd have to drop $3 million just to get him, then spend another X amount to power him up to the max. I accomplished this once. He hit many homers for my team. I named him GOD. It was great.

Ah, but what about the baseball part of this baseball game? Happily, it was great as well. The pitching/batting interface was standard homeplate view for the time. Pitchers could basically throw 4 different pitches and batters could move all around the batters box. Cool part was having the different stances for the batters: the hulking brute, the compact speedster, the classic swing, all good.

The fielding was extremely fun as well. Infielders could jump and slide. It was a game where you could dive for that scorching grounder and turn a doubleplay just like the pros. The outfield was really based on following the shadow of the ball. But the sweetest part, you could climb the outfield fence to try to steal a homerun. I did it once, timed it perfectly, stole a homerun off of Darth Wump. I laughed a long time, he did not.

Overall, this really was a spectacular baseball game. The balance between gameplay and building a team was lots of fun. The one thing that made ongoing play difficult was the powering up your team. First, you were stuck in a hellish position for a very very long time. Earning $30K for a win at the beginning makes it very difficult to build up your team very quickly. However, once you started really rolling and you could make lots of moves, you had an unbeatable team very quickly. As in all 9 of your batters, including the pitcher, could knock a homerun every single at-bat. But alas, if you get the point of having GOD on your team, maybe it's time to put the controller down.

Out of 9 innings, Baseball Stars mows down the competition with 8 innings of shutout ball. Extremely excellent.