#6 TOMMY LASORDA BASEBALL

I...Thats a nose. Also The baseball is as big as his head, which itself is as big as Godzilla. 

Big batter sprites are a cool feature, but check out the ghostly vistage of the catcher. Nothing in the rules says dead guys can't play baseball. 

Well kids it was bound to happen eventually. I knew that sooner or later I’d have no choice but to review a sports game.

It isn't that sports games are bad or pointless. But there are two things about them that make them a potential hurdle for this project. The first is, get this, ready to have your mind blown? Their target audience is people who like sports. Can you imagine? Now I don’t dislike sports. At best I’d say I’m mostly indifferent to sports. Particularly team sports, spectator sports. Watching other people exercise has rarely held interest for me. I do have some interest in hockey and boxing but even those I’ve never managed to follow for any length of time.

Be that as it may this project is all about personal growth through classic gaming. I am very much hoping to find many sports games I enjoy and maybe even discover a passion for some sports I didn’t know I had. It’s worth looking at it optimistically like this because god knows there are enough sports titles on every console ever made. I want to try actually mastering some of these sports games…..But I won’t be mastering Tommy Lasorda Baseball. And I would be willing to bet cold hard cash, neither will you.

My current theory is that Tommy Lasorda Baseball is a government artificial intelligence project gone haywire that has infiltrated the public through a Sega Genesis game cartridge. If I had to sum up basically all of my complaints about this title it boils down to an unstoppable CPU rendering the game damn near unplayable.

OR

I suck.

Honestly either one is likely. I really could suck that bad. But I think my story still holds some water because I have played Genesis era baseball games before where I didn't suck with quite this much suckatude. I don’t know all that much about baseball statistics but I’m pretty sure I had picked the best possible team. To start with I wanted to put the game on easy and set the computer up with the worst team for an exhibition match so I could learn how the game was played. 15-0. That was the final score. The CPU never swings on a ball. They never fail to hit. I got two strikes, non-consecutively, the entire game. The few hits I managed to get in never resulted in anything more than a base run and 90% of the time, not an exaggeration, the CPU always caught the ball for an instant out. It was a baseball Armageddon. I was slaughtered. I’d have picked up my ball and went home but after that game, I didn’t have any balls left.

The game isn’t “hard”. When I say a game is hard, even “too hard” I mean its got a steep level of challenge. Its like doing complex algebra without a calculator. This game isn’t hard its not playable.

I’d be curious perhaps to revisit this one to see if playing a multiplayer game is a better experience. I’d imagine so. The presentation is actually rather nice and arcade like. I especially enjoy how the ball increases in size on the overhead view, as it flies up towards the birds eye camera. It’s a bit odd how the pitching and batting work, with your player sliding all over the place to line up with the ball or position for a strike. I suppose though this was still a time for a lot of experimentation with this dynamic of the sport, the physical application of which is hard to translate into video game form.

But this is still an awesome effect. 

It is also worth noting that this is our first example of Sega’s famous marketing strategy of celebrity endorsements. This led me to research a bit about Lasorda who I knew nothing about – again not being a baseball guy. Even as a non-baseball aficionado it was an impressive career to read about. I kind of feel like this game doesn’t do him any justice. He was playing for the Dodgers while there were still Nazi’s in Europe for Pete’s sake!

The Dodger’s, the team for which most of his acclimates are accredited, does not actually make an appearance in this game. No MLB team does. This tended to happen a lot as those official licenses are often expensive to come by.

It’s hard to say if I gave Tommy Lasorda Baseball a fair chance or not. I met all my personal requirements for a game but it certainly had more to look into. It is the first example we have hit of a game running on a password system, a common feature to replace less than reliable battery backup, and had lots of stat based features that I didn’t really bother checking out. The reason for this is simple – if the single player campaign is unplayable than there really isn’t an additional mode in the world that can fix the title. It’s a bit disappointing because the game has decent presentation and may even be fun on a two player setting….But there are other baseball games that offer presentation, good multiplayer, and great single player. Most fans who aren’t collecting everything out right will likely be better off going with a later baseball title.