Ken Griffey, Jr. Presents Major League Baseball

Software Creations - 1994 - SNES

I am not a baseball fan. I played softball in high school more or less against my will for 3 or 4 years. I was terrible at it and the experience made me hate the sport of baseball. It's quite boring compared to other sports I watch or play; there's just a lot of standing around and waiting for something to happen. And watching baseball on TV is even more dull and uninteresting to me. So understand when you read this that I am not, for example, a football fan telling you how great Madden is or a soccer fan telling you amazing FIFA is. I am someone who hates baseball telling you that my favorite sports video game is actually my least favorite sport

Ken Griffey, Jr. Presents Major League Baseball (KGJPMLB) is actually the first of four baseball games to bear Griffey's name. There was another one made for the SNES and two more for the N64. I haven't bothered playing the other games in the series because I'm sure they probably added a bunch of new features and depth and realism to the game, which is not really what I look for in a sports game. The whole realism thing is exactly what turns me off in modern sports games too. I don't care if LeBron James' face has 90 billion polygons and the sweat will roll realistically down his face or whatever. I want to make LeBron James do 17 backflips, dunk the ball and shatter the glass NBA Jam style. I want to be able to piledrive players on the opposite team way after the whistle NFL Blitz style. I want fantasy in sports games, not realism. The beauty of KGJPMLB is in its simplicity and its goofiness, not depth or realism.

Ever played Divekick? The metagame of KGJPMLB is sort of similar. The buttons and controls are easy to grasp, so the difficulty and fun of the game lies not with memorizing complex sets of buttons, but more with trying to predict what your opponent will do. And like Divekick, the game is best played with another human opponent, not by yourself. One player plays the batter and the other will play the pitcher. And just as in real baseball, this is where the main interaction of the game lies. But KGJPMLB speeds up the normal slow pace of baseball by cutting out all of the downtime and waiting in the game and speeding up the action. The pitcher will be able to control the speed of his pitches, holding down for a fastball and holding up for a changeup. The pitcher can also throw curveballs, holding either left or right to make the ball veer wildly back and forth. The hitting/pitching mechanics are simple and well implemented. As a batter, you'll probably find the game difficult to play on reaction. You'll have a huge advantage if you've caught on to the pitchers patterns and can guess what speed and direction the ball is coming at. And as the pitcher, you need to keep varying the pitches to keep the batter on his toes. It's so satisfying as a pitcher when you throw two consecutive fastballs and then the batter swings way early at your changeup and curses you out.

As I mentioned before, the game is also kind of goofy. Apparently KGJPMLB had difficulty securing the rights to depict actual players from the MLB player's association. As such, Ken Griffey, Jr. is the only real MLB player to appear in the game, despite the game depicting real teams and real stadiums. This opened the door for KGJPMLB to take a little creative license with the player's names on each team. The player's names on each team in the game belong to a specific theme. For instance, the Kansas City Royals are all named after Presidents (A. Lincoln, J. Kennedy, R. Nixon etc.), the Boston Red Sox are named after characters from the show Cheers (C. Claven, N. Peterson, S. Malone etc.), and the Milwaukee Brewers are superheroes' secret identities (C. Kent, P. Parker, B. Wayne etc.). It's kind of a fun "guess the theme" mini-game each time you play a new team. KGJPMLB is animated in a sort of cartoonish way that matches perfectly matches its goofy, fun gameplay. When players overrun the ball in the outfield and slam into the backstop, they make a crashing sound and fall comically flat over backwards, which I used to love and laugh at as a kid. After striking out, the players may also break their bats in frustration, which is a nice little touch. Anyone who has played this game before also remembers batters turning to face the screen and yelling "Aww c'mon!" directly at the player after striking out in what I found out is actually a soundbyte of Jim Belushi's voice

Composed by the legendary Tim Follin, this game has a very short, but very excellent soundtrack. Also if you've never heard of Tim Follin before, you should look him up. He's probably never composed for any game that you've played or maybe even heard of, but he's an absolute legendary oldschool chiptune composer. All the while you're playing KGJPMLB, you'll be treated to this rockin' anthem, which is one of my all-time favorite tracks ever composed for any video game. Love that track. So catchy.

Summary:
If you and a friend are looking for a good, quick game to kill some time, you can do worse than KGJPMLB. It's fast, goofy and fun and will probably have the two of you shouting at each other in no time. KGJPMLB is a good example of exactly what I want in a sports game: Crazy, goofy, fast-paced action with a good sense of humor.