New Super Mega Baseball Coming Soon
Still no official announcement, but Electronic Arts’ Q2 FY23 results call and slides indicate that the new Super Mega Baseball will be out sometime early next year. Sourced from this PDF from the earnings call, and brought to my attention by emmdotfrisk.
EA’s FY23 is currently ongoing (to orient yourself, check in the screenshot and you’ll see that FIFA 23 and Madden 23 are already out), and Q4 will be January 1st – April 1st 2023.
Spring is always the typical time for releasing baseball games, so this timeline would make sense. Hopefully we’ll get an announcement soon. There has been speculation that the MLB license is still available for any arcade-style baseball games that aren’t direct competitors to MLB The Show. I think Super Mega Baseball makes a ton of smart gameplay decisions, and something like an MLB license or more in-depth progression systems would be very welcome.
Blaseball returns January 9th
The arguably baseball-related browser game (with a mobile app version on the way) Blaseball returns on January 9th.
Who knows what the new version will be like exactly, but the “game” part of the original Blaseball was pretty minimal: You can bet on simulated baseball games with fake money, then spend that fake money to vote on ways to change the league in the future. The baseball game simulations were presented in simple text, sort of like following an alternate universe’s ESPN.com live scoreboard.
A community developed around the game, it inspired many great oceans’ worth of fan art and fan fiction. Blaseball developers like to call it a horror game, though the tone ends up being more like wacky absurd who-knows-what’ll-happen. But players can get killed by eldritch creatures, so, I get it.
Blaseball has been dormant for many months now, with basically just a “coming soon” landing page. We’ll see what the new version is like soon.
New to the 30-30.club Collection
I grabbed a few games at the Video Game Cavern in Upstate South Carolina, presented here in the order I remembered them:
- All-Star Baseball 2002 (GameCube)
- Bases Loaded 3 (NES)
- The Sporting News Baseball (SNES)
- R.B.I. Baseball 21 (Switch)
I also have a couple interesting eBay purchases in the mail, but I won’t be counting those chickens today.
A Perfect Likeness
In case you’re wondering what Manny Machado really looked like in 2012 when this game was being developed… He looked exactly like Manny Machado.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- This commercial for the PS1 version of Doki Doki Pretty League got a lot of views and a lot of likes. Clearly the market is ripe for more anime girl baseball games.
- Gameplay footage for the last MLB 2K game, The Sporting News Baseball, and Backyard Baseball ’10