Baseball Simulator 1.000

Publisher: Culture Brain
Year: 1989

This is the first of what's going to be a bunch of baseball games, and it's a pretty high point on which to start. It's a pretty arcadey game, and the play is a little sluggish, but it's a generally pretty good game.

What's interesting to find is how quickly all of the baseball controls come back to you when you pick this up -- the controller chooses a base, and A and B either throw or run there. I'm not sure when these were picked to be the standard console baseball controls, but they're firmly in place on BS1, and they work pretty well. Outfielders run too slowly, and all the batters seem more or less the same, but you do have some roster control, and the sound is good.

BS1 sets itself apart by giving batters and pitchers special moves that you can do a limited number of times during a game. You can throw a ball that goes back and forth a lot, and as a batter you can turn into a burning tornado. It's basically NBA Live, except with baseball, and it adds some character to a genre that's pretty heavily populated on the NES.

Rating: 7/10 Pretty good, for a baseball game.
Advice: Play in space stadium. Every time. It's space stadium.
Best Moment: First time lightning strikes the batter.