Super Mega Baseball 4 is a towering monument to the joy of the sport
It’s difficult to envision if you didn’t live through it, but there used to be options for baseball video games on every major platform. There have been hundreds, plural, of baseball video games, which will sound like nonsense to anyone who has only lived in the era of MLB: The Show. It’s true, though! This is the way we used to live. With options, and more often than not, without MLB’s full, licensed approval.
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There were MLB licensed games, of course, but also those licensed by only the MLB Players Association, and titles where the license was just with one real player, like Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. There were also completely fictional rosters, as in SNK’s Baseball Stars or Jaleco’s Bases Loaded. There was even a baseball game without any humans at all — they had been replaced by robots in Konami’s Cyber Stadium Series—Base Wars. We had series like RBI Baseball, Hardball, World Series Baseball, All-Star Baseball, Triple Play… There was even a game called Relief Pitcher where you could play exclusively as a reliever. We had realistic sims, arcade-leaning games, and plenty in between. Options!
We’re unlikely to ever go back to that era: Game development is more expensive now than in the ’80s and ’90s, and The Show, like Madden with football or FIFA with soccer, owns the
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