GAME CLEAR No. 107 -- Super Baseball 2020

Super Baseball 2020 (1991, Multiplatform)

Alternate Title: 2020 Super Baseball 🇯🇵
Developer: Pallas, SNK
Publisher: SNK
Clear Date: 9/14/22
Clear Version: Neo Geo AES
Clear Platform: MiSTer FPGA

We will finally have robo-umps in 2020.

To borrow some phrasing from Evo Champion Hajime “Tokido” Taniguchi, sports are something so great. I love them dearly. I also love video games. You know what I tend not to love? Sports video games! The big annual sports sims just don’t do it for me no matter how hard I try to like them. They’re weird and stiff, all the people look a little odd, and the animations and physics are often janky. Plus, they mostly operate on statistics-weighted RNG rather than any sort of real-time physics engine, so there’s always a sense that some of the agency of actually playing a sport is removed. I like to contrast this phenomenon with Rocket League, which is entirely physics based and consequently feels so, so good to get better at. In many ways, it’s the only real sports game! But I digress. This post is about Super Baseball 2020, a game I enjoyed a lot. It does not run on a sophisticated physics engine like Rocket League, but by leaning into being a video game first and a sports sim second, Super Baseball 2020 offers a more compelling experience than most of its contemporaries.

The same, of course, could be said of many arcade sports titles. NBA Jam and NFL Blitz, for example, are remembered far better than any of the drier simulation titles released around the same time. They featured monster dunks, bone-shattering hits, flammable players, and an irreverent announcer. It didn’t matter that they weren’t particularly true to their sports because they were actually fun. If anything, the lack of fidelity was the point.

But before Mark Turmell was inspired to set professional athletes ablaze, there was Baseball Stars 2, a heralded arcade baseball game for the Neo Geo AES/MVS. Lacking the MLB license, it instead appealed to arcade-goers with beautiful, expressive spritework, great music, a charming sense of humor, and rock solid gameplay. It played with the baseball rules a bit too: you can earn powerups to increase your home run chances, and charging the mound when you’re hit by a pitch is totally allowed. But fundamentally it’s still just baseball. Great baseball, but just baseball. And that’s why I’m surprised it and not Super Baseball 2020 is so often considered the high water mark of Neo Geo sports titles.

I discovered Super Baseball 2020 only recently after building my MiSTer hardware emulation setup. After downloading every Neo Geo game ever released (as one does), my eye was drawn to it as the first entry alphabetically (as it is titled 2020 Super Baseball in Japan). It wasn’t a game I’d heard of, and I think there’s a couple reasons for that. First, I think retro sports games tend to get overlooked under the assumption that sports sims have only gotten better with time. Second, I think retro gaming enthusiasts and sports fans probably don’t have the biggest overlap. I’d reckon both of these diminish sports games’ presence in the “Game Canon” as it were.

I booted it up found a game that clearly shared a ton of DNA with Baseball Stars. Released in the year between Baseball Stars Professional and Baseball Stars 2, Super Baseball 2020 looks and feels like a stepping stone between those two games because it was. But what it lacks in polish as a baseball sim when compared to its successor it makes up for in its sheer gamey-ness.

The game is a baseball sim, but with all of the accurately-predicted enhancements we have come to know and love in 2020s baseball. Teams from around the world compete to win a now appropriately-named World Series. All games, of course, are played in the state-of-the-art CYBER EGG, an enclosed stadium seating untold thousands. The sport is now gender integrated, with all humans taking the field as equals alongside custom-designed baseball robots. However, because of today’s turbo PEDs (or maybe just their cybernetic enhancements), everyone can now hit the absolute fuck out of the baseball, so the portion of the stands in which a batted ball is considered a home run has been narrowed to straightaway center, about 700 feet from home plate. All other balls hit beyond the outfield fence will simply carom back into play. To compensate a bit, foul territory has also been contracted, making infielders’ lives a bit more difficult. As play progresses, landmines begin to litter the field, allowing batters to potentially get extra bases if a fielder takes an errant step. But it’s not all great for batters. You may crush an unprecedented mammoth 1000-foot blast, but if an outfielder can make it to a jump pad, he can activate his jetpack and snatch your hopes and dreams right out of the sky. Tough luck.

Other than all that? It’s baseball. When you’re on defense, you gotta get three batters out, and when you’re at the plate, you just wanna keep putting that ball in play. The game has most of the limitations of any other sprite-based baseball game: there aren’t many pitching options, batting is pretty much just a timing game with a splash of RNG, and it can be difficult to tell how to field a ball in play. But it’s still fun, the action moves along quickly, and it’s a delight to look at.

But the reason I love Super Baseball 2020 so much isn’t necessarily that it stands the test of time perfectly well but that I would love for it to get a sequel.

Baseball Stars 2 is a great game, but it has a rough modern equivalent in the excellent Super Mega Baseball series. The market for a silly baseball game that is still fundamentally baseball is satisfied. The market for a baseball game with jetpacks, landmines, and goofy stadium dimensions is not! And I think that’s a shame.

I mentioned that Rocket League eschews the sports game problem with its excellent physics engine and lack of random “press a button to maybe complete a pass” type nonsense. That’s true and great, but it also doesn’t hurt that it takes place in a fully-enclosed field and all the players are equipped with the eponymous rockets. Super Baseball 2020 does the same! Doing things you can only do in video games is an important part of the recipe. And while it’s tough to imagine a baseball game with the same kind of great game feel as Rocket League, being a baseball sim gives a hypothetical sequel a bit of leeway in that regard. In football sims it just feels bad when a player drops a pass on a dice roll. In baseball, randomness at the plate is essentially an understood part of the sport. The absolute best in the business are still gonna reach first base less than half the times they step up to the plate because hitting an expertly-thrown round ball with a round bat with any degree of accuracy is very hard! We accept that if you make a good swing and time it up pretty well, you might hit it where no on can get it and get on base. The good news is that the odds involved make it feel extra good when you do succeed. It’s the kind of game that works quite well within the confines of computer space.

Pitching also works well in games. Most baseball games have some type of little skill check mini-game that is finely tuned to be easy to do pretty well, hard to do perfectly, and just tricky enough that you’ll occasionally just completely fuck it up. Much like real pitching, it requires you to stay locked in across dozens of iterations of the same basic action lest you hang a slider. It may not really feel like pitching per se, but it offers a degree of control and variance that at least usually makes it feel like your results strongly correlate to how you performed on your little meter or whatever.

The place where a modern, rocket-fueled baseball game could shine, though, is fielding. Much of baseball fielding is completely rote and routine at the highest levels because the places the ball goes the majority of the time are covered by the fielders, who are excellent at what they do. You do have the odd spectacular catch in real baseball, but I think that’s something that is seldom captured in baseball sims. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that making such a catch requires an instantaneous read on the ball from the perspective of the relevant fielder. You can’t have that if you’re controlling the pitcher! But if you have a jetpack, maybe that’s the equalizer? Do you go for the risky, heroic 50ft leaping catch or play it safe and catch it on a bounce?

I know I’m spitballing here. I just want kids to care about baseball again. But regardless of my hopes for a sequel that will never come, Super Baseball 2020 sets itself apart by imagining a silly future of baseball rather than trying to squeeze realistic baseball out of ’90s hardware. For me, dodging landmines and hitting 1000-foot home runs in a 30-year-old video game is just a little more fun than seeing how adding the pitch clock affects the meta of MLB: The Show 23.