Super Mega Baseball

[Lacoste]

At times, it has felt like I've been leading Charlie Brown's loser team, too. Super Mega Baseball looks arcadey, with its goofy, plastic-skinned players perfectly invoking the kind of bobble-head sports caricatures you can pick up in memorabilia stores, or wherever charcoal briquets and antifreeze are heavily discounted. Its unlicensed line-ups are filled with names like The Sirloins and The Moonstars. And yet there's a beautiful core of serious simulation at the very centre of it all. In short: everything you do matters here, and, true to Peanuts' form, the game is swift to punish mistakes. Whether you're pitching or batting or trotting to first base, you need to be paying attention.

 

The lack of licenses doesn't matter - particularly when you get players with names like Keg Gutterson. (He was a thorn in my side all season, BTW - and he was on my team.)
 

Crucially, both pitching and batting revolve around the same simple choice: press one button for a standard move, or hold and release another at just the right moment for a power shot. Power shots are where the glory is, but they're harder to pull off, and they're riskier, too, as you could be giving the batter ammo for a home run, or giving the fielders an easy catch out of a clear blue sky. Choices like this reveal that while Super Mega Baseball may have reduced the game to its essence, it's sacrificed nothing in terms of intricacy, thanks to the reliance on convincing physics and systems that really measure player inputs.

 

 

Fielding and running the bases are both equally straightforward. Fielding handles a fair amount of stuff automatically as it has to in a team sport - but still gives you a lovely chugging slow-down when the ball's infield to allow you to position someone for a catch - while long balls can be met with a hop or a dive if you're quick with the triggers. Throwing to a base uses the face buttons, which provides the wonderful flavour of a neat rhythm action title, while going for a double rather than a single when running sees you squeezing a trigger and hoping, as the game plays the scuttling equivalent of the Pac-Man ghost-munching music. It's perfect!
 

 

Like XCOM, you can rename the members of your team, and the visual customisation options are pretty good too. The handful of stadiums are beautifully realised.