Bad News Baseball Review (NES)
Developer: Tecmo
Publisher: Tecmo
Released: June 1990

Bad News Baseball is one of those games that hits different when you have a real memory attached to it. I came home from school one day in 1991 to find that my parents had made the trip to the nearest Toys ‘R’ Us while my brother and I were gone. The game was just sitting there waiting on us when we got home. My dad played it right along with us, and to this day it’s still one of his favorites.

That kind of memory has a way of putting its thumb on the scale when you go back to revisit something decades later, so when the Wii Virtual Console launched and I kept waiting for Bad News Baseball to show up and it never did, I eventually got tired of waiting and just bought a Retro Duo NES/SNES player and a used copy off eBay. Between the hardware and the game I dropped about $65. The question was whether the memory held up or whether nostalgia had been lying to me the whole time.

The short answer: it held up.

Bad News Baseball is a Tecmo joint from 1990, and it leans hard into the cartoonish side of the sport. Your players are little chibi kids, the umpires are rabbits in suits, and when someone crushes a home run far enough, the ball leaves Earth’s atmosphere entirely and floats into outer space. That last part sounds stupid, but it’s actually one of the best moments the game has to offer. It fits the tone perfectly. This isn’t trying to be a realistic simulation of anything. It’s trying to be fun, and it mostly is.

Graphically, it looks like what it is: an NES game from 1990. That’s not a knock. For 8-bit, it’s clean, readable, and holds up better than a lot of its contemporaries. The sprites are expressive enough that you can tell what’s happening at a glance, and the animations for home runs and celebrations have a charm that a lot of modern sports games would trade their entire budget to replicate accidentally.

Where the game starts to show its age is in the fielding. Your fielders are slow. Not “this guy needs to hit the gym” slow, but genuinely sluggish in a way that causes problems. The bigger issue is that when you move one fielder, every other moveable player shifts in the same direction. So if the ball is hit to third and you move your third baseman, your shortstop and your pitcher are also shuffling around like they’re doing a poorly choreographed dance routine.

Ideally, you field the ball and throw to first. In practice, you field the ball, realize your shortstop is standing between you and first base, throw to him instead, then have to make him throw to first, and by then the runner is safe. Four players involved in what should have been a routine groundout.

Thankfully, this doesn’t happen all the time or even a majority of the time. Nevertheless, it does happen far more than I would like for it to.

Batting is simple, maybe too simple. One button hits, and bunting requires you to release the button at exactly the right moment, which is inconsistent enough to make it mostly useless in clutch situations. Baserunning is mostly automatic once the ball is hit, which means you’re reacting to fly balls rather than initiating anything. It’s easy to accidentally send multiple runners at the same time when you only wanted one moving, and that’ll cost you if you’re not paying attention.

None of that kills the game though. It’s still fast, still fun, and still has that one perfect moment every session where you send a ball into space and feel like a little league hero.

If you’ve got an NES, a Retro Duo, or any other way to play original cartridges, Bad News Baseball belongs in the collection. It’s not perfect, and a handful of its quirks have aged into outright flaws, but the core of it is solid and it plays quick enough that a full game doesn’t feel like a commitment. Sometimes that’s all you need.

Bad News Baseball gets a four out of five: COMMENDABLE.

TITAN’S DECREE:

If you enjoy this one, you might also like to check out my review of R.B.I. Baseball ’14 or Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr., for more video game baseball action. Or click here to check out more game reviews. If you’re in the mood to find a movie to watch, you might be interested in my review of My First Mister.

Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.

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