340 · Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball
All weekend ballplayers know softball's no joke, but that doesn't mean you can't have a little fun with it. And when you step up to the plate in this cart you'll find the wackiest bunch of players to ever hit a softball diamond!
Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball is a baseball game in a schoolyard costume. Mike, Sean and Joe were on this one, and we spent more of the episode on the draft screen, the parks and the manual than on swinging a bat, plus a detour on how big a softball is.
What works
- The draft. You choose from 60 players by looking at their faces, and the screen plays like picking sides in gym class. We built teams of freaks: sunglasses, vampires, purple skin, odd couples. The manual has stats for every player, and we mostly ignored them.
- Parks with their own rules. Some have fences, some have a pool or a lake, and one lets a ball roll past the run line without a fence in sight, which makes inside-the-park home runs easier. Some players can climb a fence or swim after a ball. The first time one floated in mid-air we thought it was a bug. Others only fly at night, and some hit harder after dark.
- Low stress. Striking out as a ragtag team of kids stings less than striking out as the Mets. It plays the way every NES baseball game plays, so we could pick it up with no manual.
- Five-round elimination. You work through prebuilt teams toward the Amazons, who are undefeated according to the manual and, in our experience, never make a mistake. We liked a bite-sized run more than a 162-game season, and we have never finished one in any baseball game.
- The little touches. Players swing mops and caveman clubs, and getting hit by a pitch has a silly animation. The manual gives every character a bio, so Sid Savage can be your clutch guy.
What doesn't
- The goofball ideas are underused. The special abilities come up rarely, and most of the time the core game looks like every other NES baseball game we've played. Most of the charm lives in the manual and the draft screen, not in how it plays.
- It barely looks like softball. The ball is white and looks like a baseball, not a big yellow one. The differences we could find were an underhand pitching animation and seven innings.
- No sequel. With a 60-player roster, a second game could have doubled it, added a moon stadium, or given the Amazons a jungle. We also joked about draft packs, a battle pass and 99-cent microtransactions on the NES.
The bottom line
Play it. Nobody voted it onto the Essential Games List, and the reasons were similar: it's charming and chill, but it plays like the other baseball games, and there are more competent ones. Another baseball game would need real mechanical differences to earn a spot. Still, we put it in the top half of everything we've played so far, and it's an easy game to pick up for a quick five-game run. If you want a baseball game on the NES, make it this one.
Written from our conversation in this episode.
- Choose your team… and play ball
- NES Longplay
- Manual
- Plenty of Baseball games, but this is my first softball game
- In fact the only thing I know about softball is the different bigger ball
- The Story
- Mudville is the setting for the classic poem "Casey at the Bat" and hosts the annual World's All-Star Championship softball tournament.
- Sixty top-ranked players compete on six different fields, ranging from a rocky sandlot to a major league stadium.
- The tournament's stakes are high, combining the intensity of the All-Star Game and the World Series.
- Players can get advice from Dusty Diamond, a legendary all-time All-Star, to help their team win.
- In one-player mode, you compete against the computer to win five elimination rounds and the final championship against the "Amazons."
- In two-player mode, you can play against another person on any of the six different playing fields.
- Player Profiles
- Gary: Decent all-around but not strong enough for a winning team.
- Ace: Great arm, some power, runs through water well, good outfielder choice.
- Don: Good pitcher, runs through water.
- Fuji: Power hitter, can knock down infielders, excellent catcher, good for batting #3 or #5.
- Slick: Great defense and decent offense.
- Froggy: Hops around bases, fast, can hit long balls, runs through all obstacles, excellent lead-off or #2 hitter.
- Diablo: Uses a spiked club, excellent power hitter, perfect cleanup hitter.
- Mike: Good pitcher, reliable hitter for singles and doubles.
- The Parks
- Park Field: Many outfield obstacles, home run line doesn't mean out of play.
- Island Field: No obstacles, one of the bigger parks.
- School Field: Fun field, breaking a window with a home run counts as an out.
- Cliff Field: Few outfield obstacles, one of the smallest parks.
- Sandlot Field: Numerous obstacles, smallest park, best fielders needed in outfield.
- Professional Field: Biggest field, tough to hit home runs except for strong hitters like Diablo and Fuji.
- Hints and Tips
- Players perform better or worse based on various conditions (e.g., types of pitches, time of day, specific fields).
- Ideal lineup combines speed, power, and good defense.
- Sequels and Spinoffs
- Essential Games List Vote
- Next week
- NEStalgia Byte
Auto-generated transcript. Each paragraph starts with its timestamp. Speakers are not identified.
Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball. Choose your team and play ball. Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball.
And welcome to NEStalgia, a chronological exploration of every NES game released in North America. I'm Mike. I'm Sean. And I'm Joe. And the headline is choose your team because that'll take a while in this game. Yeah, it's like an actual like schoolyard draft. Is Dusty Diamond in there anywhere? See, now that's a good question. Is Dusty Diamond a famous... Mike, you know more about this stuff. Is Dusty Diamond like in the Hall of Fame?
Of softball. Do you assume that Dusty Diamond was the name of a person and not just referring to how dusty these diamonds are? Oh, so you're saying that maybe it's a play on words, Joe? No, not even a play on words. I just think it's literally a baseball diamond that's dusty because it's dry dirt. Well, you can get it... I highly doubt that. You can get advice from Dusty Diamond. Oh, can you? I mean, I thought that... You can, and I don't know if we're gonna go with the bit or not, but he's not a real person. Hmm. I started answering and then I stopped because I realized I might not know what I'm talking about.
That's why I cut off there. Because it's not the dusty... Like, Dusty Diamond is not like the field you're playing on. It is Dusty Diamond's like possessive all-star softball. Like as if it was Ken Griffey Jr.'s Major League Baseball. That's true. I'm seeing the apostrophe now. Right, right. Or Dusty's Diamond's like all these diamonds are just all-star softball. Like, it could have just been like that. But it's... But it is... It's not. It's not. Yeah, it's not. Right, right. Okay, I don't know how much longer we should go on about that. Maybe we should talk about the game or something. Actually, no, let's start somewhere more interesting.
We've played plenty of baseball games, so we don't really need to get into it right away. But this is, at least for me, my first ever softball video game. And it made me realize, I don't really know a lot about the differences between baseball and softball. I know that the... It's a different ball. It's a bigger ball. But why do you think they went with softball instead of baseball? I think they wanted to make it feel more, at least for the slow pitch, more recreational. You know, because you're not playing... Well, there are professional diamonds, but you also play like on a cliff or on like an island or in like a schoolyard or something. You know, a lot of like... A lot of like... It feels like your kids playing softball.
Yeah, like you were mentioning before we got off track, like it does feel more like a... A proto-backyard baseball or whatever that franchise is called. Where it's not really taking itself too seriously.
And, I mean, that's not to say that softball isn't as serious a sport. But, I guess it doesn't have the same reputation. Well, no, and also, you know, softball, there's serious softball players, serious sport, but then also a lot of people who want to play like in a beer league play beer league softball, not beer league baseball. So, like, yes, there's serious softball, but I think there's more recreational softball for, you know, grown men who are dads than there are recreational baseball.
Like American soccer. Right. And even like half the playing fields, that's like a weird... Half of the baseball diamonds that you can play on are not even like stadiums. They are just like people's backyards and stuff. So, yeah, they're totally going for that recreational feel. Including, I believe that some of them have like their own... Like the field is different, right? There's like some obstacles. Yeah, they have their own rules. Like, I like that.
Yeah, this is where I started to realize, like, I wonder if I don't know the differences between softball rules and baseball rules. Because some of the like, oh, this field's rule is that like if a foul ball pop-up is caught, it's an out. I'm like, isn't that just a regular rule? It's always a rule in baseball, right? I thought so too. Unless it's not the case in softball. The wording was weird there.
Yeah. But like, were there fields where that wasn't true? Where you would catch a foul ball, it's not an out? It's always an out. Unless it's like one of those Savannah Banana games, right, Joe? Yeah. Where like all of a sudden if a fan catches it, it's also an out.
Highly recommend Savannah Bananas, by the way, folks. But, okay, so like other than the, you know, adding some obstacles to a, you know, like a field is whatever. There are some other interesting ones though too, where like, if you hit it past the home run line, it doesn't, like it doesn't mean that you can keep going further.
I like that. So like technically inside the park home runs are easier to achieve in, in park field. Oh, you mean if it, if it like bounces past the, the run line? Yeah. Right. There's a whole, there's no field, there's no fence there. So instead in, um, which one is it? Park field. Um, but then there's also like, it's like a, there's a pool in that one, like over by the third bay side or something, or lake. Uh, so anyway, the point being, forget about, uh, all the chit chat.
The parks are what make this game something a little bit more unique on top of the fact that, uh, you know, overall the feel is this is not a professional game of baseball being simulated. This is similar to, uh, what our generation would describe as like the backyard baseball style games, right? Where all of a sudden it was like kid Derek Jeter versus kid Alex Rodriguez. This is like, you have a roster of an insane amount of people to pick from. And you started on a screen where you have all of their faces and you just, I don't know, like what, what was the strategy there for you guys? First time you're booting up the game. Like, how are you picking your team?
I just had to pick the weirdest looking people. Like whoever was wearing sunglasses or whoever kind of like a vampire or if they had like purple skin or what the closest thing to it. I just wanted a, I just wanted a team of freaks. And I think, you know, like if you're, it's the equivalent of if, if you're lining up for, you know, gym, gym class softball or after school softball, and you're doing a draft, like, you know, I would, I would pick the people that I thought were the most, uh,
athletic among us. But in lieu of that weird. Yeah. Well, I, I went a similar route where I just like picked people that I thought looked like would, would be like odd couples. You know, I wanted like a ragtag group of people you'd never expect to see together. So like some cool guys with some strange guys, I put them next to each other. Like, Oh, these guys are gonna be buddies by the end. Um, but the way that I would probably do this if I, uh, played more having read the manual now is you realize there's actually a lot of stats. Everybody has like stats. Yeah. I don't get time for that. Get that from the manual. So like, that's how you can build your team. That's how it's obvious. I think meant to, to be, but yeah, I just had fun with it also.
Yeah. With 60 players that is asking a bit much, but does add a ton of replay value. I suppose, uh, the bigger deal about the individual characters, other than that, some do share, even if you're doing Sean strategy, like some of the faces do look awfully similar. Uh, there's a couple of those vampire looking dudes, uh, or devil dude, you have a whole team of them.
Yeah. Uh, so, so if you do just pick randomly, you might miss out on some of the, uh, like special abilities of certain characters that also help depending on which stadium you're playing at. Yeah. So again, like some have fences, so some players can jump over those fences or sorry, climb on them. Uh, and that, that gives a distinct advantage over somebody who say, uh, can swim, which apparently not every, uh, able-bodied person here can do. And they can go into the water hazards and, uh, catch the outs that way.
Yeah. The first time I saw one of these special abilities happen, I thought it was a bug. Like I, there's, there's like some characters that can fly or at least like jump really high and then sort of hold the jump. And I'm like, did, did something just, did this like sprite just become unmoored from the game? And then I realized like, oh no, that's like a feature.
Yeah. The, uh, they float in the midair, uh, but these are like cool things. Oh no, there's a float one, but there's also a fly one, but the fly one's interesting because they can fly only at night. Has to be a night game. Uh, vampires. Yeah. And there's also increased power at night too, which for a different thing, which I think is, um, I think all of these things are the kind of, uh, things that would bother me if they were in a game of, uh, major league baseball.
But since they're here in dusty diamonds, all-star softball, uh, I don't know. It really brought out, um, uh, a, a more carefree and more like what, like I didn't stress when I was striking out or whatever, more than I would in the usual NES baseball games. Cause like, you know, it's, it's hard to, to just constantly keep swinging at pitches that are balls and you, and you know, you missed it, but you swing anyway because you don't have a strategy. So you just swing at every, uh, pitch that the pitcher throws.
And that gets frustrating in a game where you're supposed to be playing as like the New York Mets. And I love the New York Mets. So I gotta, you know, I gotta root for my Mets and win games as the New York Mets. But when I'm just like a ragtag group of kids that I just picked and you know, uh, the grass fields have like, they make it harder to run in or, um, or, you know, like I, I didn't know that I was supposed to like have this character for this. Cause I found it to be, uh, you know, a lot less stressful knowing that. Yeah. It was a very, uh, it was chill. It wasn't like the, the gameplay itself wasn't too complex or anything. And I kinda, I kinda enjoyed that from a baseball game. It was just the, it was simple.
Yeah. I think that, you know, the, those, those powers are, are nice and they, they add some flavor. Um, the, I guess like just the, the, how infrequently you use them contributed a bit to where, contribute a bit to the feeling that I have is that they didn't really go far enough with the goofball antics. Like I appreciated that, like some of them, you know, they're, they're swinging mops there. They're swinging like old, uh, like clubs from caveman days. And, uh, that that's all very cool too.
But it, it, most of the time it, it just kind of felt like we were playing almost every other baseball game that we played. Like it didn't, like the core gameplay didn't stray too far away from what has come before. And I think that was a little bit of a missed opportunity.
Yeah. But it was, it was a testament to the fact that like, I could just pick this up. I didn't have to look at a man. I mean, I could pick it up and I know exactly how to play immediately. Right. I think a, I think a lesser game would have made like the teams, like, this is the cavemen.
Right. And like, they're all, they all use the club and they all have like this one special ability. And then another one's like the vampires. Right. It's like, it was nice that you kind of get this amazing cast of characters to which the point where like the manual even has bios for all of them. And they're not even like relevant to like, yeah, they tell you about like a little bit about their stats or whatever. There's a separate thing for that, but these are like bios about the characters themselves. So if you kind of create your own mythos around like, you know, uh, Sid Savage, right? Like that guy always comes in clutch for you. And then you can like read up on them and get a little bit of backstory there on Sid.
Uh, I think that's fun. And I think that that's what makes this game. The most unique thing about it is that playground aspect to it of picking, you know, your random team. It's gotta be random. There's no way I'm sure there's competitive dusty diamonds, all-stars softball somewhere in the world, but it's not for me.
And anytime I boot up this game, you better believe I'm just picking based on like Sean said, the faces and I'm just going with that. That's my team. That's also kind of what I mean. Like the most of what makes it cool is sort of outside the mechanics of the game. It's, it's more so like the fact that each of these goofballs has a bio in the manual. That's not really reflected in the game itself. I think it would have been cool to have a bit more integrated into the game.
The weirdness. Yeah. It is kind of like a quirky fun skin on top of the base baseball game. Softball game. Right. Cause the game, cause to your point, Sean, the game is selling you on the weirdness factor, or at least like, you know, that it's not like every other baseball game on NES you've played and you're kind of saying, well, it kind of is actually like mechanically still works like every NES baseball game I've played, which is mostly true. Even just looking at, you know, not even thinking about the special rules of the parks or whatever, but just the actual controls of the game and everything. Yeah. It does kind of, um, it doesn't do anything to stand out there. And so instead it focuses on, it highlights the weird factor.
And in the one player mode, uh, you know, you can't just play exhibition matches or whatever, but there is also sort of a, uh, not a story mode, but a five round elimination match thing where like you keep taking on, um, prebuilt teams that eventually leads you to the final championship match against the Amazons, uh, who apparently are like undefeated, at least according to the manual.
Uh, do you think you need more than like a five? Like, you know, we played games where you could simulate an entire 162 game season. Is five game elimination like enough to substantiate a, uh, story behind the game? I guess it depends on what you want, but for me, I think it's plenty. That's exactly what I want. I want five games and just to sit down for like an NES game. Like it depends, I guess, but like, I don't want to sit down and start a whole season of this.
That makes it sound like I hate this game. It's great. It's fun. But like, if that's exactly what it is, it's fun. It's quirky. It's like a chill game. So like five games, I think is, is plenty. It's not like, you know, it's not like an MLB. It's not MLB the show where like, okay, I want to get like invested in this for, you know, for like the whole summer or whatever, which I Joe don't want that either. But I know a lot of people do want that, but I don't think this is trying to do that.
Yeah. Kind of like, I know in a lot of other sports games, you could just like simulate the playoffs or not simulate the playoffs, but like have there be a playoff bracket. You're not playing the entire season leading up to it. Um, but I think that even that might be too much for some moods I might be in. What I, what I think I liken it to more is, um, back in the day I play jet moto, uh, which is a fake jet ski, uh, future racing game. Um, but basically you could either just do individual races or you could make your own like circuit where you'd go from X, uh, X course to Y course and you could do it in whatever order you wanted. It could be however long you wanted.
And at the end you could have like total standings between all those races or I guess like, you know, any cup in, uh, like Mario cart. So I think that's a better, it's like, it's not bite size, but it's almost bite size. And even just to take it out of the genre for a second, you think about, um, arcade fighters or, you know, something like street fighter, uh, you really in street fighter two, you only fought like six or seven other people maximum before, you know, before you beat the game technically, but that was a really hard feat to do. And I think the same applies here, especially with the Amazons who have, you know, uh,
unflinching AI that doesn't make any mistakes and you really have to play perfect to beat them. It's one of those things where it's like, you're probably going to play if you, you know, if your goal is to beat, uh, all five teams, it's going to take you a lot to successfully beat all five teams back to back to back and everything. So you'll keep replaying that just like you would, uh, the fights in street fighter. So yeah, I also agree that, uh, I have never in a single baseball video game, despite some honest efforts. I have never actually completed the 162 season. I probably have gotten as close as like 112 or something like that, but it's just, you're going to burn out eventually. And nobody wants 162 games with, with these guys, right?
No, no, no. But could they have taken the idea of like a rec league any further than just the gimmicks that you were describing, Sean? Like, was there anything else, uh, not trying to sim it out or anything, right? Like you would also go to school then and develop a relationship with these guys. Open world. Right, right. Not trying to do that, but just thinking about the rec part of it. Uh, you know, was there anything else that they like maybe left out that you were looking at? I'm trying to think now. That's a good question though.
Um, I think like modifiers would have been cool. Like, okay, so you got to trim the active, uh, it's gotta be like a randomly generated of however many characters, like there's only so many that showed up at any given day and they can have like, like, oh, this one's tired because he had a rough day at work or, uh, uh, you know what I mean? Like just little modifiers that could latch on to any player that you might pick. That could be, that could have positives and negatives. Like, oh, he's going to have more power, but he's going to be really slow around the bases. I don't know. Yeah. I think like, and then keeping it in that same, uh, that same theming of like very mundane modifiers.
Yeah. I, I, I like that idea. Uh, uh, not that sparked an idea in me, which is probably not exactly what you're asking. This is a little bit more of a, like a rework, but what I thought you were originally saying was that like when you're drafting the teams, like maybe there's a pool of, of a hundred characters, but only 40 of them are available to draft and it's random. It was every time you're like, oh my God, Lewis. Yeah. That's kind of what I mean. Yeah.
Or maybe you, you unlock packs of players. Oh God. There's a battle pass. I'd love that. Huh? I'm kidding. That'd be amazing. That would, that would, that would elevate this game for me. Yeah. And just like little baseball cards. Now you can play the player on the baseball card. Right. And then you can, uh, just go to the online shop and pay 99 cents for a thousand credits to get another baseball pack. Yeah. Microtransactions. Perfect. Bring them to the NES. Uh, what, one observation, the softball isn't bigger than the other NES baseballs that I've seen from the other games. Right. Like where I thought, you know, and, and I, you know, historically for me, it's also yellow, right? Like the softball is usually like a highlighter yellow color.
Neither one is true here. That just looks like a baseball to me. So a little disappointing. From what I can tell the only things, and again, I don't, I don't know the answer. The actual details, but the only things that they've done in this game to make it softball, because I'm pretty sure that softball doesn't have rule changes based on what park you're in. Um, is the animation is clearly an underhanded pitch and, um, there's seven innings. I think that's it. Hmm. Yeah. And that is true. That is a, that is a big difference.
That softball only has seven innings. Um, which is also true of like little league, right? Is it? Pretty sure. Yeah. I mean, when I played little league, it was seven innings. I'm not sure if it's a universal truth. I don't know if it's like a real actual, like little league world championship. Yeah. Little league world championship definitely goes to seven. Not definitely not. Okay. I mean, if anything, it'd be even shorter. It'd be like six kids. These kids don't work. Come on, make them, make them do the whole nine.
I'm not asking for the ball to be comically big either, because that would just obviously make the game play either really easy or a pain in the ass against the computers that would always make contact with the balls you throw, but just something, I don't know, maybe, maybe it comes down a little slower or something. I don't know what I'm looking for. I just wasn't looking for a little white ball that looks exactly like the hard balls of old. I mean, when I look at this relative to the pitcher, it's about softball size to me. No, no way. No way. Look at, look at, look at NES baseball ball. Look at the picture. Well, look at the size of their heads.
Okay. The size of their heads. Sure. I don't think there's any room for comparison and scaling with no, if you, if you scale these people up, they would be exact normal human looking people.
I always think that like a softball is the size of like, if you take your palm and like fully extend out your fingers, like that's a softball. And the, yeah. Right. Just the palm or the hand with the fingers, the hand with the fingers. Like you need to like, you need to put the ball softball. Yeah. You need to like, I think you need to curl your fingers a little bit. Curl them up. Yeah. Everybody at home do this too. So, okay. So you stretching out your fingers. Okay. So stretch them out. This way they're like equally spaced. It's like a grapefruit. It's like a grapefruit, but like a, a medium to small grapefruit.
Okay. So then you, yeah. You, and a baseball is like an orange. So you're curling them up a little bit. All right. Yeah. It's like halfway. Yeah. Cause you have to curl up for, for a regular baseball too, obviously, but you almost like get your fingers, like your fingers almost touch when you're holding a baseball. Yeah. Unless you have super tiny hands, you should still be able to like, you know, have your hands on all sides of it. You know? Unlike a basketball. Yes. Agree. You can palm a basketball though.
Okay. If we've got particularly large hands. I think you could do it. Specifically me. Yep. It's like the size of a watermelon, right? Watermelon. No, basketball is smaller than a watermelon. No, no, no. Softball. Softball is definitely smaller than a watermelon. That's funny. Yeah. I just wanted them to throw watermelons.
All right. We lost the plot. Yeah. We lost the plot a little bit. So we'll go over to the sequels and spinoffs. Unfortunately, there was never another dusty diamonds all-star softball, which is weird. Because they already established a 60 man roster. So like, they could have easily been like doubled the size and been like now 120 characters in dusty diamond softball too. But really all it is, is just like more stat adjustments.
Uh, so that it feels bigger. I could have seen a lot of ways to do this. Uh, also we've seen this in some other, not MLB baseball games already, but where was the stadium on the moon? That could have been in the sequel, right? Obviously. Uh, where's the, you know, speaking of the Amazons, right? It's like, where's the jungle level? I didn't, I, I don't really get the sense that any of those are supposed to be, there's an island, but I don't, I don't feel a jungle.
Uh, so these are all things that they could have built up, uh, for the, for the big sequel, but they didn't. And there aren't too many softball video games, but there is one that, um, features a famous major league baseball player. And that is Sammy Sosa's softball slam on PlayStation one. And that has the same, you know, rec league appeal, uh, uh, of dusty diamonds. But, uh, with Sammy Sosa on the cover while he's also a major league baseball player, like it felt like he was retired from baseball. I think he was like, this was his peak. It was purely for the alliteration. Like it would have been a baseball game. Well, they shouldn't change his name, not the sport. It should have been Bami Bosa's baseball.
No, cause there is another, there's also Sammy Sosa high heat baseball, 2001, which just rolls right off the tongue, obviously. Uh, and was released in the year 2000, which is even worse. Uh, so that, that, that sucks. I hate when companies do that. When the, the year of the game is one year ahead of the year it was released. I mean, isn't that like every sports game? Yeah, but I don't like that. I'd rather be the one that I, the year that I'm playing the game in. Right? Like, but that's like last season.
Uh, what if, you know, what a little, you know, you, you buy, you know, MLB 2025 and you're playing for like six months before 2025 is the 2025 hits and they change all the rules of baseball and you're like, well, now this game doesn't make any sense anymore. Could, could be true. But also I just want to go back to Sean's point for a second. I think Sean, that that works for, for Madden. Like sure. Right. Cause that actually like the season starts in September and ends in January. Like I get it, but baseball, you know, it starts in, uh, end of, uh, end of April and, or no,
it starts in April and goes all the way through October. So it's like a good calendar year. So I feel like you could just name the game, Sammy Sosa's high heat baseball 2000. And it's good for the entire year of 2000. So wait, was there a Sammy Sosa's high heat baseball 99? That's, that's what's even worse, Sean. No. So there, and there wasn't a Sammy Sosa's high heat baseball. Oh, there was never another Sammy. So they were just really confident that there'd be another one. I see. I mean, everyone, everyone named their game 2000 in 2000, you know? Well, this is Sammy Sosa's high heat baseball 2001 guys. Oh yeah. Well then it released in 2000. So I'd be looking for Sammy Sosa's high heat baseball. One, two, three, 788.
Where are all those copies? They've got to be somewhere. They should have made Sammy Sosa's January 1st at midnight baseball. Nobody would know what day they were talking about.
Or you. That's true. All right. And now that we've also lost the sequels and spinoffs section, we're going to find the one part of the show that matters. And that is the essential games list.
I don't think it's too much of a surprise that I really liked Dusty Diamond's all-star softball. Cause I mostly just talked about the features that in another game would just kind of like, we spent so little time on the mechanics and the actual playing baseball and just more on like the, Oh, this game's so cute. And you have all these like weird guys and you assemble your own team. And like, we didn't talk about this, but like when you get hit by a pitch, or if you hit somebody with a pitch, there's also like this silly animation.
Like there's a lot of charm in this game. That was enough to hold me over, uh, during my play session for this episode. Do I think it's essential games list ready? No, not really. I, there's more competent baseball games. And there's also more like, I don't know, this is, this is fun, but it's not even like arcade fun actually. So it's not even in that genre of like, Oh, well it's doing something different than baseball games. Like it's still basically a baseball game with just some weirdness in it. So I appreciate the weirdness, but it's not enough to get on the list. John. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the mechanically aside from some shenanigans in the outfield,
both for the player and for the field itself, this just really plays like every other baseball game we've played. And, um, I, I think like, if I'm going to play another one of these, it better have some like actual differences. And I, I just hope it's a while before we play another baseball game. So not, not essential. Gil. Yeah. It's, um, it's pretty basic in the gameplay. I was initially very intrigued by everything surrounding the gameplay, the, the, the schoolyard pick the, the different rules on different fields, just the different fields themselves.
Um, all very cool. And, and I think that makes this a, a great entry into the, into the list of growing baseball slash softball NES games. Um, but yeah, nothing makes it stand out enough where I would say it's essential. So not a list of best baseball, just list of baseball games. Right. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's in, I I'd say it's in the, it's in the, the top half of, of the games we've played so far. I liked it a lot. The top half of all games we've played so far or all baseball games we've played so far, which is almost as many. I would say it's also probably in the top half of all NES games I played so far. Yeah, probably actually with how many bad games we've had. Yeah. That's for sure. Right.
Um, like let's just, just real quick, random scroll first for Sean. Sean, would you rather play dusty diamonds or would you rather play all pro basketball? I don't quite remember all pro basketball. So I guess I'll go with dusty diamonds. There you go. See, guys, it's foolproof. It works every time. Uh, Joe, ask me. Yeah. Dusty diamond or, uh, POW prisoners of war. Hmm. Let me think about this while I'm definitely not Googling a video of POW prisoners of war. It's a beat them up. Uh, that helps. Oh, and there's definitely not an ad playing right now before I can watch this beat them up. Okay. Skip ad, which is not what I just did.
And I, I'd probably play a POW. Yeah. All right. So it's not foolproof. It just depends on whether the person can remember, uh, the other NES game, which Joe definitely could. Yeah, I could. Yeah. That's why I didn't have to look it up. Well, next week we have a game that some people might've heard of. It's a little thing called final fantasy.
And, um, I think, yeah, I think you guys, you're familiar with it a little bit, right, Joe? Yeah. I, as soon as this, as soon as we're done with this, I'm off the show. This is all I've been waiting for and I'm done. I've just been holding out for final fantasy. And here I thought you were going to leave after a super Mario brothers three.
Well, then you were like, Oh, but final fantasy is coming up every week for, you know, we, we, I don't know if the listeners know how many times we've thought it was time to play final fantasy and then found out that we were wrong on when it was actually released. It's been like at least four times. This is like the fourth time we've been like about to play final fantasy. This is like a popular franchise. It better be because if this game doesn't sell, it will be squares. Final fantasy. Wow. Great.
