Spring is in the air and one thing about spring is that it means baseball. I’ve always loved baseball. I played baseball from Little League and on into High School. I even played in an adult men’s league as recently as a few years ago, but I had to finally retire as my elbows could no longer handle the strain.
Over the years I’ve also been in several fantasy baseball leagues, but also stopped doing that a few years ago. Today we have shared season tickets for the local baseball team, the Portland Sea Dogs, so I often attend live games.
I don’t play a lot of video games, but I did always love a good baseball game. I never really found an Atari 2600 baseball game that I liked. The original Home Run was rather awful, but incredibly simple graphics and not much to the gameplay beyond hitting the ball.
RealSports Baseball is much better, by all accounts, but I’ve never played it. It’s not one of the games I currently have in my Atari 2600 collection.
Atari also released versions of RealSports baseball for the 5200 and 7800, which all look even better.
When we got our Atari 8-bit computer in 1983, most of my game playing moved to that. In those early days, I would often play Star League Baseball, which had a somewhat unique view of the field.
In later years, Accolade introduced HardBall!, which had impressive graphics for the time. I also played this one a lot. HardBall had a wonderful close-up view of the pitcher/batter experience, a first for the time. However, its transition to fielding was less than ideal with everything being cramped to fit on the screen and movement of outfield players slowed down to simulate field size.
I have HardBall! on cartridge for my Atari 130XE today. Although Hardball was also available on the ST, I don’t recall playing it. It was mostly just a straight port with much improved graphics.
The Atari Lynx had Baseball Heroes, but I’ve never actually owned a Lynx.
Unfortunately there was no baseball game released for the Atari Jaguar.
A few years later when I wanted to get a Sony PlayStation in 1996, I waited until the much-delayed MLB Pennant Race was available. I remember going to Electronics Boutique at the mall almost weekly to get status updates on when the game would be coming out. I bought my PlayStation as soon as the game was released. I recall this game had some really strange glitches, but the graphics and overall gameplay were great. I played this game a lot.
But back in my Atari days, the baseball game I played the most was MicroLeague Baseball on my Atari 800XL. I really liked that game and kept extensive stats on the 1975 Red Sox, which I would always use to play against the other historical teams that were included. It was always tough trying to beat the 1927 Yankees with their Hall of Game lineup!
The graphics of the Atari 8-bit version were not very good. Plus, the colors relied on CRT artifacting so don’t look correct on an LCD.
But I recently picked up a copy of MicroLeague Baseball for the Atari ST. I remember reading about it back in the 80s, but I never owned it.
In Talking Baseball, Part 2 I’ll be covering the Atari ST version of MicroLeague Baseball and comparing it to the 8-bit version. Be sure to subscribe!
What were your favorite video game versions of baseball?
I still play Hardball on my XEGS.