RBI Baseball 2 box front cover

Friday Starter – British R.B.I. Baseball?

Tengen Crosses the Pond

Only one new game in the 30-30.club collection this week, but it’s a cool one!

We all know about R.B.I. Baseball 2 for the NES, a Tengen-developed follow-up to Namco’s original Famista game. But, interestingly, there was also an R.B.I. Baseball 2 released in Europe only for several computer systems of the time: Amiga, Commodore 64, Amstrad, ZX Spectrum, there’s a DOS version even. And last of all, the version I received on eBay, shipped to me from England, R.B.I. 2 for the Atari ST.

Some early thoughts:

  • Completely separate to my interest in baseball video games, I love the “bedroom coder” era of British computer games. So I love the familiar “lads ‘avin a laugh” tone here in the credits in the manual for the game’s developers, “The Kremlin.”
  • It’s not necessarily due to the Britishness of the game, but it’s hard to ignore a lot of little oddities in how the game is depicted. The field is wonky, with the infield dirt extending all the way to the dugouts. Cheerleaders are on the field the whole time, more like football than baseball. And most mind-bending of all, the scoreboard goes in the wrong direction: The scoreboard makes it look like the bottom of the 1st happens before the top of the 1st.
  • The scoreboard animations look nice but are so, so frequent that I can’t believe anyone has ever played a full game with them on. I turned them off for the video above, but imagine if the animation that happens at the end of each half-inning also happened after every hit, out, or even foul ball. Madness!

Lineup of the Week

Presented without further comment… An imaginary lineup of baseball game developers.

Lineup

1 Namco – CF
2 Konami – SS
3 Visual Concepts – C
4 EA Canada – 1B
5 Metalhead Software – RF
6 Jaleco – LF
7 Sega – 3B
8 OOTP Developments – 2B
9 San Diego Studio – SP

Bench

OF – Acclaim Studios Austin
IF – Hudson
C – Mindspan
LF/PH – Blue Castle Games
IF – BlueSky Software

Rotation

Ace – San Diego Studio
#2 – Culture Brain
#3 – Tengen
#4 – Sports Mogul
#5 – Magical Company

Bullpen

Long Reliever – Stormfront Studios
Middle Reliever – Konami Osaka
Middle Reliever – Now Production
Setup – Humongous Entertainment
Closer – SNK