And it was a revelation.
It was colorful. It had a full set of (fictional) teams, the Champs and the All-Stars, with player stats! And it had what was, by far, the best pitcher/batter interface of any baseball game ever made at that point in time. It set the action right behind the mound and you saw the pitcher wind up and throw in real time and as the batter you had to time your swing and guess the right pitch. This sounds silly today but back in 1985 this was truly ground breaking stuff.
Pitchers had their own arsenal of pitches; I still remember Doc Tompkins had a fastball, a fastball, a fastball and a FASTBALL! The latter being his extra speedy 2-seamer. A curveball actually curved and not in some Magic Bullet sort of way but it looked like a curveball; the screwball was damn near impossible to hit; the sinker fell off the shelf. It was arcade baseball at its absolute best and really set the stage for the direction that baseball games would take from that point on. For a 13 year old kid in the summer of ‘85, Hardball was the quintessential hands-on baseball game. The game in the field was average at best, but Hardball will always be remembered for its amazing graphics and its utterly addictive pitching and hitting models.
Slightly overrated? Maybe—but certainly deserving of a spot on this list.
9. Front Page Sports Baseball - Sierra
It’s amazing that FPS: Baseball was ever made. Sierra squeezed every drop of code from the people at Dynamix, who were coming off the creation of the fantastic Front Page Sports: Football games and the company now wanted Dynamix to crank out a baseball game. This was the result.
The baseball game never reached the same heights as the football opus, but FPS: Baseball might be the most underrated game on this list. Online league management, career play (a huge selling point to the PC crowd), reams of data and player ratings, an elegant PC interface and a surprisingly passable physics model for a mid 90s game made it incredibly popular with simulation freaks.
The game’s biggest problem was that it wasn’t a very good hands-on game—it shined in manage only mode more than it did with a joystick in your hand. The initial release was also terribly buggy but after being patched up and over the next couple of versions, the game found its stride and is in fact still played today as online leagues are still being maintained—ten years after the release of the ’98 version.
Its other innovation? The PB.ini file which allowed users to tweak the gameplay itself to fit their own needs – a trend that we’d see more of in the coming years.
