Major League Baseball (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
0A playthrough of LJN's 1988 baseball game for the NES, Major League Baseball.
This video shows an American League regular game, playing as the Minnesota Twins against the CPU-controlled Baltimore Orioles.
Major League Baseball, developed by Atlus and published as an American exclusive by LJN, was the first NES game to be officially licensed by MLB, meaning that the game features the names and likenesses of all twenty-six teams. The player names are missing, however, as LJN was not an MLBPA licensee.
The game features three modes: you can play a regular season game, an All-Star game, and the World Series. You can create your own line-up, designate pinch hitters, and make substitutions as you see fit, implying that Major League Baseball strove to provide a somewhat more comprehensive take on the sport than we saw in Nintendo's own Baseball (https://youtu.be/k_hETp0pAuU ). Unfortunately, all of these things are for naught if their value is limited to bullet-point fodder on the back of the box.
LJN's reputation for publishing terrible games was well earned, and Major League Baseball is a shining example of the company's indifference to quality when there's profit to be made. On the surface it looks similar to games like RBI Baseball and Baseball Stars, but the feel of the games could not be more different.
Major League Baseball is utterly ruined by its lack of care, polish, and attention to detail.
Fielding is all-but-broken. The view is too zoomed in, the camera doesn't track the ball well enough for you to position your guys for a catch, and the AI doesn't move anyone who is offscreen into place for you. Once the ball has been hit, the d-pad controls every one of your teammates at once, so you can actually run ahead of the ball with your pitcher for some easy outs.
When fielding, the AI always throws to the base that the lead runner is heading toward, so as long as you have someone on third, you can always steal second uncontested. At times the AI fielders also seem to get confused and stop moving all together.
Pitching is just as bad: tricking the braindead AI is not just possible, but easy to do with every single throw. If you want to pitch a perfect game, always throw change-ups that cross home plate at the very last second. The AI batter will stand there and do nothing.
When you're at bat, the more hits you get, the more the AI will swap out its pitcher. Since each player can only be subbed in once, it is possible for the AI to run out of pitchers. Since there is no option to forfeit, when there are no more pitchers to choose from, the AI gets stuck in a menu loop, bringing the game to a dead lock that can only be fixed by resetting the NES.
The issues that I've mentioned here only scratch the surface of the game's problems. It feels like it was nowhere near finished when it got shoved out the door, and it manages to be only slightly more playable than the thoroughly broken Japanese version of Bases Loaded.
And that white noise crowd just doesn't know when to quit! Who knows, though? There might be some sort of message encoded in it. If anyone feels the urge to put on a tin foil hat, lemme know if you find anything! Does it remind anyone else of the noise old computers made when they were loading from cassette tapes?
The graphics are plain but servicable by 1988 standards, the controls are functional, and it is nice to be able to play as real-world teams, but in the end, none of those things save Major League Baseball. I'm sure that it has its fans, though. Plenty of kids probably loved it when it was new.
It's not as soul crushing to play as LJN's Back to the Future Part II & III was (https://youtu.be/Q3LtrThw8Y8 ), but it's so riddled with problems that it could hardly be called a better game. Hand-in-hand, MLB and BttF 2&3 desperately cling to the lowest rung of LJN's quality ladder.
It's the worst baseball game on the NES, and in this state I have no idea how it came to be adorned with Nintendo of America's "seal of quality."
Random final thought: if push came to shove, I'd still choose Major League Baseball over Back to the Future Part II & III every time.
_____________\nNo cheats were used during the recording of this video. \n\nNintendoComplete (http://www.nintendocomplete.com/) punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games!