Super Baseball 2020 (SNES) Playthrough
219A playthrough of Tradewest's 1993 baseball game for the Super Nintendo, Super Baseball 2020.
In this video I play through the entire 1P League mode in the Fighting League as the Tropical Girls team.
Super Baseball 2020, developed by Pallas (who also did the bizarre but fun license-based beat 'em up Eight Man: https://youtu.be/xApyYLh_Z1M ), was originally released in 1991 for the Neo Geo MVS and AES platforms. It's a "futuristic" take on baseball that includes all sorts of high-tech twists, including robot players, land mines, a new field layout, and of course, plenty of explosions.
In 1993 it received a port to both the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis, and I was really excited about it. Base Wars had quickly become one of my favorite NES games a couple of years earlier, and the prospect of a 16-bit upgrade had me chomping at the bit. The SNES version wasn't ever going to match the Neo Geo version, but given that Super Baseball 2020 was an early, fairly simple and small game by Neo Geo standards, it was fair to expect a reasonable approximation of the original.
And that's exactly what the Sega Genesis got.
The Super Nintendo version? Well, as much as I was looking forward to the SNES game, after renting it over a weekend that summer, I was only too happy to go back to my beloved Base Wars. That might sound harsh, but I was beyond disappointed.
The expected cuts in the move from the Neo Geo have been made to the presentation: animation frames were cut, all sorts of little graphical details are missing, and most of the voice samples are gone.
What wasn't expected was the sheer number of cuts and changes that impacted gameplay. The layout of the field was simplified, the cracker mines were removed entirely, human players can no longer be injured, and the medic robots are gone. The MVP awards were taken out, money no longer carries between games, and there is only one music track that plays on loop throughout the entire game.
These changes make for a game that feels little like the Neo Geo game that it superficially resembles. They are also changes that were made *only* for the SNES game, probably in part due to cartridge size. The original game was 46 megabits. That's not huge - the SNES eventually had carts of that size - but in the early 90s, that much memory would've driven the retail price of the game into the stratosphere.
The SNES game ended up shipping on a 12 megabit cartridge. The Genesis cart, however, was 16 megabits - a significant increase that resulted in the Sega game being far, far more faithful to the original.
The game also suffers from some horrible bouts of slowdown, poor sound quality, and the fielding and base-running controls are mushy and laggy. The biggest thing that undermines the game, though, is the sloppiness of its coding.
It's fairly easy to pitch perfect games by exploiting the AI. If you throw the ball just outside of the strike zone and then redirect it back over the plate just before it reaches the catcher, the AI batter won't swing and it'll count as a strike.
You can also win a game without ever hitting the ball: the AI pitcher will often toss pitches outside of the strike zone, and it's quite easy to steer your batter into the path of the ball. If it hits you, you're given $1000 and the base. Since batters can no longer be injured, you can do this again and again, racking up runs with very little effort.
These things aren't difficult to accidentally stumble across, either. I remember discovering both issues when I rented the game, and together, they make for a game that is as braindead and dull as it is easy. It's only a step or two above LJN's Major League Baseball (https://youtu.be/18Hon9so10M ) because of these problems, and it's a real shame, because it could've been great.
Super Baseball 2020 on the SNES was a huge disappointment. If you like the idea of "extreme" baseball on the SNES, you'd be far better served by the excellent Super Baseball Simulator 1.000.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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