Bo Jackson Baseball (NES) Playthrough
107A playthrough of Data East's 1991 license-based baseball game for the NES, Bo Jackson Baseball.
In this video I go through the Play Offs mode on the All Star difficulty level as Oakland.
Bo Jackson had already become a video game legend as football's freight train from Hell with Tecmo Super Bowl (https://youtu.be/IyHhFg3wod4), but did you know that he also had his own NES game? A not-football NES game?
I'd assume that it came about because "Bo Knows Baseball." Or at least, that's what I seem to recall being taught by 90s shoe adverts.
But Bo Jackson's Baseball didn't begin life as a vehicle for a lucrative celebrity endorsement deal. It was part of Cinemaware's "TV Sports" line-up of games that was popular on the Amiga and the TurboGrafx-16 in the late 80s/early 90s, and was known as "TV Sports Baseball" in Europe. Data East, however, decided to enhance its appeal with an expensive glam-up when they picked up the North American distribution rights.
Cinemaware, as you might guess from its name, built its reputation on making "cinematic" video games with impressive graphics, including the likes of Defender of the Crown (https://youtu.be/sl7YQNf2Lns), It Came From The Desert (https://youtu.be/vPlOv5tbbBo), and The Three Stooges (https://youtu.be/T8-rvW4BZM8).
(If you're not familiar with the TV Sports series, do yourself a favor and look up TV Sports Football on the TG16. That game's title screen animation is pure magic.)
The NES version of the game, produced by Beam, suffers the same major cutback as all its Cinemaware siblings on the NES - the graphics are the tortured husk of something that was once quite striking - but it does still manage to give the vague impression of being "flashy" by NES standards. The character sprites are huge and nicely animated in the pitching/batting views, the umpire's unreasonably aggressive tone comes through clearly as he barks his calls, and that "performance" of the Star Spangled Banner is... well, it's something, isn't it?
The gameplay makes for some good fun. There's not a lot of depth to it - it is light arcade fare more than it is a sim - but it controls well and moves along at a fair pace, and it has a good sense of humor. The rosters are full of chuckle-inducing twists on real player names to avoid running afoul of the MLBPA, and the cutscene of the batter getting nailed by a wild pitch drew a laugh out of me more than once.
Bo Jackson's cart is a perfectly decent way to play some 8-bit baseball. You could do better and you could do worse, but if Beam's über-gaudy house style holds any sway over you, you'll love everything about this game.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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