It’s hard to imagine if you haven’t experienced it, but there used to be options for baseball video games on every major platform. There have been hundreds, plural, of baseball video games, which will sound like bullshit to anyone who’s only lived in the era of MLB: The Show. It is true! This is the way we used to live. With options, and more often than not, without MLB’s full, licensed endorsement.
There were MLB licensed games, of course, but also games licensed only by the MLB Players Association, and titles where the license was only for one real player, such as Ken Griffey Jr. presents Major League Baseball. There were also completely fictional rosters, like in SNKs Baseball Stars or that of Jaleco Bases loaded. There was even a baseball game without humans – they had been replaced by robots in Konami’s Cyber Stadium Series—Base Wars. We had series like RBI Baseball, Hardball, World Series Baseball, All-Star Baseball, Triple Play… There was even a game called Relief pitcher where you could play exclusively as a reliever. We had realistic sims, arcade style games and a lot in between. Options!
We’ll probably never go back to that era: game development is more expensive now than it was in the ’80s and ’90s, and The Show, like Madden with soccer or FIFA with soccer, owns the space in large part because of has the edge over someone else. However, the rise of Super Mega Baseball has seen at least one other valuable entry arrive on modern platforms, and it has two advantages: it doesn’t have to deal with the slog of era that causes a popular franchise to stagnate, and it’s just an instant, obvious blast to play.
Super Mega Baseball developer Metalhead Software (and now publisher, EA) doesn’t have to worry about releasing a game every year to get a licensing deal with MLB and the MLBPA. It has its own players, its own teams, its own stadiums. Metalhead spent the better part of a decade building the 2014 original Super mega baseballrefining, sharpening and developing the mechanics while also adding new ways to play: Super Mega Baseball 3‘s franchise mode and its online leagues, just to name a few. Super Mega Baseball 4 has built even more on those solid foundations, giving you more to do between games and seasons – on both the silly and serious sides – and the result is another excellent baseball game worth trying even if you’ve never played the previous entries. played, or any other baseball game.
Image: Metalhead Software/Electronic Arts
For the uninitiated, Super Mega Baseball is something of a mix between Backyard Baseball and Power Pros, with a mix of tight, highly refined mechanics and a cartoony, tongue-in-cheek humor driving it all – the addition of Legends to the fourth entry adds extra weight to those past Backyard Baseball compositions. Baseball is not as hard a sport as the American representation of it sometimes suggests. the world baseball classic, for example, shows that the international game is much more than appearing solemnly and politely. Baseball is fun! And Super Mega Baseball 4 enjoy this, with that fun appearing in every pillar. The wacky player and team names, the memorable, serious (and stubborn) way everyone is drawn, the sheer number of mustaches you’ll see, the excitement of the crowd, that baseball in this league is not just a men’s game but includes women as well on an equal footing – it’s all like that pleasure. Really, real-life baseball can be so much fun, both to watch and play, and it’s great that there’s a video game series, with a fantastic new iteration, to remind us.
Super Mega Baseball 4 possess the joy and energy – not energy as in vitality, although it is not lacking in that either – that you associate with minor league baseball, only with the kind of skill and talent that you associate with the major leagues. Despite how arcade-y it can often be, Super Mega Baseball 4 also exudes sim-like appreciation for the details of the sport. The difficulty slider lets you fine-tune the experience, giving you more or less reaction time on the plate, on the mound, and in the field, while also controlling how often opponents make you pay for mistakes. If you don’t know what a foul pitch is, Super Mega Baseball 4 you can learn in a short time.
You can feel that the computer opponents learn from your behavior and adapt to it as well. You can fool hitters or make your pitches anticipate, and it’s not a random, but a believable response. The third time by the order penalty – a real phenomenon that denotes the dangerously familiar third batter a pitcher sees on a given game – pops up here if you don’t take out your pitchers or know how to adapt to the batters’ adjustments. The higher your difficulty, the less likely you are to get away by leaving one space higher in the zone. But at the same time, if you know when to fire a missile, hitters will chase even when they should know better – just like in real baseball. Everything may look and sound like a caricature, but Super Mega Baseball 4 is the real deal when it comes to depicting the symphony of small details, and their massive consequences, that make up the sport.
Image: Metalhead Software/Electronic Arts
If something, Super Mega Baseball 4 is even more realistic than the realistic The Show, largely because apart from 200 newly introduced Legends such as David Ortiz, these players are not really, giving you so much more room to project and fill in the blanks. The characters feel alive in the way their moods and their health levels change over the course of a game, series, week, whatever, and how that in turn makes them more or less inclined to accurately score a bad game. pitch on the corner, or to hit a ball with authority on the outside of the plate, and so on. Each of them can take you on a sort of personal journey through their struggles and triumphs, and the path leading from one to the next makes the whole experience that much more enjoyable.
Not only did the struggling player put you in the lead with that two-run homer, but he got there after a few games where you screwed everything up without showing anything. And since you were there all those times and watched them go from “locked in” to “neutral” to “tense” to the point where they might even need a day off to try and make amends, that thing counts for more then on the scoreboard. You can feel the weight they’ve been carrying slipping off as they watch the ball go over the fence, or see a breaking ball hit the inside corner and freeze a batter, and it will only connect you more to the player and the game . All this from the same game whose cover is graced by both Ortiz and someone called “Hammer Longballo”. Super Mega Baseball 4 is full of crazy energy and baseball is the perfect sport for it, even if it doesn’t always come across on TV or in the most “realistic” video games. And like every previous iteration in the series, this is the best digital version of the sport you could hope to play.
Super Mega Baseball 4 was released on June 2 on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code from Electronic Arts. Vox Media has partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.