"Pro Yakyuu World Stadium" - Turbografx-16/PC-Engine

Oh god, a baseball game. I'm having flashbacks of Baseball already. You would think such a simple game couldn't harm anyone but I still have PTSD flashbacks of trying to win one game for 3-4 hours straight.

Anyway, Pro Yakyuu is a baseball arcade game series by Namco, apparently inspired by the Pro Yakyuu Family Stadium game on Famicom, which we haven't even gotten to yet. That game came out in 1986, and was made by Namco as well. PC-Engine in these early years seems to have been a place for arcade ports similar to the Famicom's early titles, so we're right at home with this kind of game. This is Namco's second outing on the PC Engine, and it seems they developed this port of their arcade game in house.

Interesting factoids: of the teams in this game, there are three hidden teams. One is composed of NLB players (the Japanese version of MLB), one is composed of MLB players, and one is called "All Dreams," which basically hits every ball no matter where it's thrown and has amazing pitchers. In later games, apparently it was renamed to "Anime Stars."

Anyway, let's ppplllllAYY BALL!

The watch feature will probably come in handy when I need pictures of
someone actually getting more than one inning into the game before losing.

----- Playthrough -----

I'm once again not going to explain the rules of baseball, but the general flow of Pro Yakyuu is that you pick a team from a selection of 9 teams, and the AI is given a team. They seem to move in some preset order, because the game asks you for a password-- presumably if you beat a match, you'll get a password to continue onto the next team in order, next time.

I chose the purple S team, because it appealed to my inner nature.

It seems that the letters represent caricatures of real NLB teams this time around, which you can see  the list of on the Japanese Wikipedia, assuming you can read katakana or otherwise have Google Translate handy. For instance, the L stands for the Lionels, which is a reference to the Saitama Seibu Lions. I guess actual licensing was probably too expensive to bother with.

Once you pick a team, you're thrown into the game after a short bit of fanfare music. In my experience you always seem to bat first, which is good, because it gives me the chance to start my early lead that I'll need to stand any chance at all.

The pitcher's name is P. Pipi, which is hilarious to me.

Of course, you can only build a lead if you can hit the ball and have it not be a foul, and despite my repeated efforts I was never able to figure out really how to do that consistently. The AI pitches the ball so quickly that I can't imagine ever having time to mentally decipher whether the ball will be a strike or a ball, so you basically just have to take a gamble and swing if you feel good about it, near as I can tell.

I never felt very good about it and I was pretty much always right that I shouldn't have. I wasn't able to score a run before the side-switch.

Run, fatty, run!

Once you side switch, you'd think you have it easy playing as the pitcher, but of course the CPU has lightning fast batting reflexes and no matter how hard you try to fake them out or pitch near the edge of the strike-zone, they'll hit it at max power. It took them about 3 pitches to score their first home-run, and two points to start the game off with.

Well, I mean, it was only 137m so... big deal. Psht.

So anyway, by the time I finally finished digging my own grave trying to be clever with my pitches (I tried pitching fast, I tried mixing in intentional balls, I tried curving the ball out and in of bounds, I tried pitching at the ground...), the enemy team had 9 points to my 0 and things were looking pretty grim.

After another round at bat and pitching, we both had 1 point more.

Then finally, I took another round at bat, didn't score any points, and once the enemy team scored one point, the 10 point slaughter rule was put in place in the third inning and the game was over.

Well, at least I tried, I guess.

Not satisfied with my poor performance and thinking surely I could at least play a 10 inning game before losing, I started the game up again and went into battle a second time. I managed to lose by slaughter rule in the second inning.

*teary eyed thumbs up*

Apparently I'm not very good at baseball games.

----- Review -----

How long did I play?

20 minutes.

How much did I beat?
I couldn't even get to the end of one game.

Intuitive Design: 

How easy is it to intuitively understand the game?

If you understand baseball there's very little to not understand here. It plays like baseball, there are really no surprises as far as that goes. Every control does basically exactly what you expect it to.

Gameplay / Difficulty: 

How rewarding does playing the game feel?

Well, I'm clearly terrible at baseball games and they're the bane of my existence, but I think it's pretty ridiculously hard. I'm sure there's probably something I'm missing, but it just seems like the CPU is so good at everything. Even standing all the way back at home plate, I don't have time to react to their pitches, and they hit 95% of mine even when at full speed.

Unlike the NES Baseball though, you can actually control your outfielders now, which removes some of the hyper pissed-off-ness I was experiencing watching them try to catch up to a rolling ball, at least.

Now I can just get hyper-pissed when the ball gets hit into the deepest corner possible.

Depth: 

How deep/long is the game?

According to the Japanese Wikipedia, winning 9 games allows you to go up against the all-star teams, and I assume after that maybe you can say you beat the game? Which means something like 10-12 matches, which is plenty of game time if you're having fun.

It's not like the formula for baseball can change in the middle of the game though, so it's as deep as it will ever be.

Sound / Graphics: 

How's the sound? How are the graphics?

The graphics are pretty good for what they are. Players have reasonably sized sprites and especially during pitching/batting, look nice on the screen. On the field they're small but it allows for a lot of screen real-estate for the actual game to be played, which is fine.

From what I heard, there's really no music except for the game-opening ditty. It's fine, and the sound of the game is fine, but music never (or rarely) hurts a game.

Personal Chord: 

Does the game have that undefinable "something" for me?

Yeah it has that undefinable something that makes me want to break the HuCard in half. Though, it's actually pretty definable: I think it might just be the simple act of being a baseball game that infuriates me at this point. I wonder if I'll find one that doesn't make me want to strangle someone on this blog, eventually.

Should You Play: 

Is there a reason to even bother with this one?

If you like baseball games, this seems like a reasonably more exciting outing than NES' Baseball, but I'm sure you can probably find a more exciting newer baseball game to play as well. When it comes to sports games in general, outside of select instances where they add something unique to it, it never really seems like you'd bother to play anything but the newest incarnation of it.

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