Bases Loaded 2: Second Season

Developer: Tose
Year: 1990

Now, we're talking.

Before I start, I don't own Bases Loaded 1. The reason for this, for those of you who don't collect, is that it's a really easy to find game. This sounds counter-intuitive, but you don't go get the easy games, because games tend to be sold in lots. So someday, I'm going to have to accept Bases Loaded 1 in order to get a game that's actually hard to find, so it doesn't make any sense to buy it on purpose. That's how it works, and it's why I have 30 super marios and no kid icarus. Yet.

In any event, BL2 is the baseball game we've been looking for. Things to recommend it:

• really tight, responsive gameplay
• great balance
• the ability to play a 130 game season with stats
• players have tracked 'abilities' that allow you to monitor their performance over the short and long term
• pretty good animations and better graphics than prior baseball games

Generally speaking, this has felt the most like actual baseball to both Laura and I of the games we've played so far. The game ended 7-4, which is a major upgrade to the 18-19 and 23-25 losses I took in the 9th innings of the last two games we played, both in terms of not losing and increased realism.

By way of quirks, Bases Loaded shows pitches from behind the pitcher, rather than the batter. This is different, and neither better nor worse than the other way around.

The game has 2 negatives: the song is SHIT, and they play it over and over and over. And the baserunning scheme is off sometimes -- you press the direction of the base you're ON rather than the base you want to GO TO when running forward, but it switches when tagging up. This is confusing, and there's no real reason for it, since as I mentioned below, the standard baseball console game controls had clearly already been hammered out by this point.

In the end, though, this was our favorite baseball game so far. It still doesn't look good, and pitching is a little weird here -- selection and placement are sort of smeared together -- but it was fun to play, and the rest is hair-splitting.

Rating: 7/10 I'd play this again. Also, I won.
Advice: Play it with the sound off, or stuff ears with cotton.
Best Moment: Realizing that in this one, you can actually catch a fly ball. Wow.