After months of no sports, having a batter up in any context really is super.
One of Namco’s most successful franchises is its baseball series “Family Stadium,” or ‘Famista’ for short (which sounds like a joke I might make up, but it’s not). The series began with 1986’s Pro Baseball: Family Stadium, which was adapted by Atari for American audiences under the name RBI Baseball. That game proved to be quite popular here, and it spawned a franchise of its own that Namco had nothing to do with. The Famista series, meanwhile, continued undaunted, which brings us to this week’s game.
Super Batter Up was released as an SNES exclusive in 1992, as an Americanized adaptation of the Japanese game Super Famista. They sure loved shoehorning the word ‘Super’ into titles in those days. But is this one really, you know, super?
A handful of sports games from the late 80s and early 90s ran into the issue of securing a pro league’s license or the player’s association license, but not both, leading to some weird team configurations. This includes Super Batter Up, which had the license to use Major League Baseball’s players, but not the teams themselves. While they can’t use team names, the game still uses generic locations to identify the teams, like so:
Since this game uses the rosters from the 1991 season, I couldn’t help but try out a game as my beloved Minnesota Twins – or MIN, as this game needs to call them. They won the World Series in ’91, so I imagine we’ll do pretty well. I arbitrarily chose a game against SEA.
Just look at that MIN lineup. Packed with guys like Greg Gagne, Chili Davis, and Shane Mack. And some better players, too. SEA, meanwhile, has some great up-and-comers like Edgar Martinez (still at third base, interestingly), Jay Buhner, and of course that Griffey fellow, who would have his very own game just a couple of years after this. To my dismay, I’d forgotten about another SEA player who was about to make my life a living hell.
Noted elite pitcher and bird murderer Randy Johnson, whose fastball proved to be a nightmare for even my best hitters hitters, was miserable to deal with. Here I am failing to make contact for the first of many times as Chuck Knoblauch, or “Knoblach” as the game reduced it due to space constraints. Chuck wasn’t the only one to get this treatment, either. Here’s what the game did to Mike Pagliarulo:
Oof.
Like a lot of old baseball games, Super Batter Up struggled with a lot of the details. Pitching is often rough, as you just don’t have a ton of options for nuanced pitch placement or the like. Playing in the outfield is a pretty big pain at times as well, as you can’t always gauge where you need to go to catch a fly ball, which can lead to some frustrating outcomes and extra bases for your opponents. Perhaps the worst of all is the game’s hitting mechanics, which give you so little time to react and try and put the bat on the ball in a meaningful way. I realize that this is literally how baseball works, but it rarely felt like I had much of a chance. Perhaps it’s not as much of a pain when you’re not up against Randy Johnson.
Once again – oof. If you’re like me and are interested in random old sports games, give this one a pass. It does some number of things right and has the real players and all that, but those things are easily outweighed by the things it does wrong. I suspect it might be a bit more fun with two players, though.
Interestingly, while the gameplay is more or less the same between Super Batter Up and its Japanese original, Super Famista, their graphics are completely different. The latter has a much more cartoonish look:
Believe it or not, the aforementioned “Family Stadium” series that includes this game is still going – the newest iteration Pro Yakyuu Famista 2020 is slated for release on the Switch in a couple of months, nearly 34 years after the first game in the series was released. Here’s a screenshot from that:
Yeah, I don’t know.
The next Retro Roulette is another 16-bit sports game, but this one promises to be much, much weirder. See you then!