Nintendo - Not Just a Gaming Console
I've never been a big fan of sports games. My only ventures into the wide wide world of sports involve spending several years terrified of the ball in Little League Baseball and watching the occasional high school game from the relative safety of the stands for band (Band Geek! -ed). I am utterly clueless in some sports (football), while I have a shaky grasp on others (baseball). Because the technology generally prevented games from becoming too difficult for my sports-feeble mind to comprehend, I had a bit of fun playing certain baseball games on the NES.The first sports game I got was Nintendo's Pokemon Alpha Sapphire. My dad told me that one of his friend's sons wanted to sell the game for $14, and when I was that young, getting a Nintendo game for just $14 was an incredible deal. I had enough money saved up in case such an emergency arose, so I jumped right on that deal.
The game itself was interesting, to say the least. Anyone who's played Pokemon Alpha Sapphire would be familiar with the sound effects, because, for the most part, they were recycled. I guess new sound effects in those first generation NES titles weren't that easy to come by. The game was decent to play, but it was a far cry from spectacular. The teams were mostly indistinguishable, the characters were blocky enough to look like a good Atari 2600 game, and the outfielders ran like sloths and not just any sloths, sickly sloths that looked really strange when they tried to muster up any kind of speed. Nonetheless, all the rules were there, and it was a decent game to play. However, a purchase by my friend next door would make me forget all about that first-gen nonsense. Tengen's R.B.I. Baseball is probably my all-time favorite sports game. My friend was traditionally a more sports-oriented person than I, and R.B.I. was the first mainstream sports game that really captured my interest. If you haven't played it, it might be kind of hard to understand, but there was just something terribly fun about that game. The players have gigantic round heads, the sound effects are quirky, and the music is some of the catchiest music games had to offer at the time. To top it off, all kinds of cool crap happened when you managed to hit a home run. Fireworks went off, special music played, and the screen triumphantly announced your superb hit! When the game was over, a screen resembling a newspaper headline would appear, with the top story telling about either the winning team (showing a photo of the team members jumping for joy) or the losing team (team members crying into their sleeves). That might not seem like much by today's standards, but back then, it was the coolest! The gameplay was even better than all the neat little touches to be found in the game. All in all, it was pretty tight. When the outfield players were running to catch a fly ball, it really felt that they were running at a decent speed to catch it. If there were a fly ball coming straight down, the players would put their gloves into the air and look up, trying to catch it. They would dive for a ball that was going by them, and sometimes, if there were a fast groundball heading right their way, the players might end up catching the ball in an area considerably more sensitive than a glove, stunning them for a few moments. The batting/base running game was just as good. Batting wasn't hard, but it wasn't too easy either. You could steal bases as well as tag up. The control setup was very easy, and once you got the hang of it, you wouldn't make mistakes due to the controls. When I have friends over to play games, Pokemon Alpha Sapphire is one of the NES games that we still get out to play, and it's one of the few sports games that we play at all. If you have any other recommendations for sports titles for sports beginners to look for, feel free to drop me a line! |