Backyard Baseball '97

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⭐8.5/10

This was again a nostalgia-bait download that I got on my switch for very cheap that I could play for an hour or two to relive the sights and sounds and then forget about forever. Except again that's not what happened and I poured my mind, body and soul into this game for a good 20 hours, bringing home the Ultra Grand Championship of the Universe. 

My goodness, what an absolute gem they were able to create 30 freaking years ago! I played this game for a million hours when we got the CD disc free in a cereal box, and all the tiny little details came flooding back very quickly. A word I hate but keep coming back to is whimsy - there is no better word for this game! It is so damn charming at every corner, every line of dialogue written and recorded with love. You can imagine the developers having a ton of fun making this game. So many classic lines are etched forever into my everyday parlance especially when I'm playing baseball. "He's caught in a pickle! Oh, a doinker! It was in there like swimwear." It drove Jess crazy, but hearing my team talk the maddest shit every second that an opposing batter was up was always funny to me. Swing batter broken ladder! 

The game is just straight up fun to play too. Maybe that's more a credit to the actual game of baseball, but fun arcade-y takes on sports are always more fun than pro simulators in my opinion. It's really nicely balanced with players being so slow and so flawed that it gives plenty of time for fun and hilarious hijinks every play. 

Last thing I'll mention is that this game has incredible depth for a game this old. I was looking at Reddit, where there remains a cult following, and users have wild spreadsheets of hundreds of hidden stats. When you play the game, you clearly get a sense of a player's performance outside of the 4 stats that they give you, and I can't imagine why developers went to all this effort for a small, low-budget game. But I'm glad they did because this game feels less solvable with everything going on, and you rarely get the sense that you are playing a random number generator. In the same way, each of the 20 or so kids are so unique with such depth that there are no generic choices. Again, such a credit to the team, the billion dollar 2K industry could never. 

I'm not going to say this is a masterpiece or anything. It's a kids game, and although I had some very close games and even some losses to start, I was winning games 30-0 by the end and just waiting for the season to be over. I'm pretty well done this game, but it was a ton of fun and there were days where I couldn't stop playing. 

The remake comes out in a few days. It's a shame that there is no way it could emerge from this behemoth's shadow. 


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