Excitement! Craze! The Stirring Game!
Fairly complex baseball game, here's some details on how this game played from someone that grew up with it:
A Baseball game by Bandai where the Perfect team battles it out with the Champions team. Actually, as any fan of Japanese baseball would quickly realize, “Perfect” and “Champions” are actually the “Pacific” and “Central”, Japan’s equivalent of the American and National Leagues.
The game is actually pretty sophisticated on a number of levels. Along the sides of the screen you will see players’ names as part of the batting order. Each player has a unique programmed personality that effects the game in progress, including batting average, slugging percentage, and running speed. Each team’s pitcher has a stamina counter that goes down the more (and harder) the pitcher works. Pinch hitters and relief pitchers are available. There’s even a little car that brings out the relief pitchers.
The players in the batting order are real players. Some of them are foreign (non-Japanese) players. For example, Batting second for the Champions team is Randy Bass, who was tossed between several major league teams before becoming a Japan Series (“World Series”) MVP and Triple Crown winner with the Hanshin Tigers. Batting in the seventh spot for Champions is ex longtime Montreal Expo Warren “Cro” Cromartie, who also had a successful career with the Yomiuri Giants, the Yankees of Japan.
The game can be played either single or two player. When played single player, it is played from the right control set. Gameplay is about as realistic as could be expected from an LSI game—final scores after 9 innings tend to be actual baseball scores, be they 0-1 or 7-5. There are only a few necessary concessions to the limitation of the LSI format—for example, runners automatically and instantly return to base after a fly ball has been caught.
