Basewars

Vitals:

Year – 1991

Developer – Konami/Ultra

Genre – Sports

Modes – Single Player; Two player Co-op; Two player Competitive

Back to another one of my favourites; Basewars.  For those of you who don’t know what the game is about I’ll lay it out for you, from what I remember.

Imagine baseball, in the future, played by battle ready robots.  Play too close to call?  The one who is still alive wins.  Add to that being able to upgrade/customize your team (kind of like the draft but way better) and you’re rockin.

So I was all psyched to start playing and customize my team – unfortunately I discovered pretty quickly that you can only do that in the ‘pennant’ matches which are player v/s player.  Not having a second player made that pretty difficult.  Everything else was exactly like I remembered though.

It took me a while to get the hang of things, hitting the ball was especially difficult at the start.  Why was it so difficult you ask?  Because the pitcher has control of it the whole time it’s in flight.  Ever seen a ball change direction three times?  Four?  Well if you haven’t come play this game. 

Powering up the pitch was another thing that took some practice.  I learned really quickly that throwing fast balls made for lots of opposing home runs.  The key was to fake out the batter.  Throw a ball like you’re going to hit him, then dodge it at the last second over the plate, they never see it coming.

The base wars were not as fun as I remember.  Basically pummelling the CPU into the ground wasn’t all that entertaining.  I seem to remember that as friends we had a ‘code’ for fighting these battles which involved letting the other guy stand up for a second between your rapid fire punching.  And if you have a sword, or are a flying bot, steal every base all the way to home, you can’t lose.  It’s fun turning an infield ground ball into a home run.

The Good Stuff:

The concept is great, robots fighting over bases.  The execution is pretty great too.  The pitching control and the player controls are quite well done.  You have to get good at guessing where the ball is going to land because you won’t necessarily see your bot until just before its falling.  It isn’t terribly difficult, but takes practice.

The graphics are actually pretty cool for 16-bit days, where you can see the bots close up anyway, the fielding graphics are nothing special.

I remember the customization being one of my favourite parts of the game – it’s too bad I couldn’t get in to that part of it.  Oh well – I still had a bunch of fun stomping all over the CPU players in the open season.

The Ugly Stuff:

I had a lot of trouble throwing the ball to the right place.  I would always be pressing left or right to throw to the ‘next’ base - instead I was supposed to be pressing up to throw to second.  Now this isn’t really a con of the game, being able to throw to home plate from left field is really simple and a one click button/direction – but for some reason my brain didn’t want to work that way.

The battles didn’t live up to my memories of the game.  They seemed to consist of who could press the attack button the fastest.  And the special attacks for the hoverbots were pretty brutal.

When playing the CPU on a foul/fly ball the players wouldn’t run back to their appropriate bases.  So no matter how long I took to finally throw the ball to the right places, I got outs on all of them.  I think this is a pretty big downside to playing against a computer.  I mean, it helped me win a bunch easier, but sure took some of the challenge out of the game.

When having multiple bots on base it was difficult to tell them all to run to the appropriate bases, sometimes two would go to the same place, or one would go backwards instead of the right one moving forwards.

Overall:

Definitely a two player game to get the most out of it.  It held my attention for a while just beating on the computer, but lacking that customization and second player interaction really left me wanting more.  I think that’s the same with most sports games though, they aren’t made to necessarily be played alone. 

What is really unfortunate is that there was never a sequel, and nothing like this has been done since.  Can you picture a Wii game like this?  I sure can.