Ohtani is now hawking Pawapuro and Prospi games
The official Powerful Pro Yakyuu Twitter teased earlier this week that they had a new celebrity endorsement incoming. I agreed with this Discord user’s speculation at the time:
But Konami did in fact land the big fish:
Konami continues to promise big things for the 30th anniversary of the Pawapuro series (Ohtani is also 30 years old, you see) and the 20th anniversary of the Pro Yakyuu Spirits series. Including a player employed by a Major League Baseball team has fueled new speculation about the return of MLB Power Pros. This still feels unlikely to me, but the odds have definitely moved in the right direction for a series return (especially with three more Team Japan stars coming to MLB this year in Yamamoto, Imanaga, and Yuki Matsui).
Ohtani’s dog, Dekopin, stole the spotlight again by ripping up a Pawapuro-kun doll:
Here was my humble Photoshop contribution, putting the Pawapuro-kun doll in the game over screen from MLB Power Pros 2008:
So it still remains to be seen what new baseball games are coming from Konami this year. We can pretty safely assume there will be a new Pawapuro game sometime, due to be announced any day now. For the rest, we’ll see.
Meanwhile Ohtani didn’t have a single social media dog incident during his whole year promoting MLB The Show back in 2022. Sony and San Diego Studio need to step up their plushie game.
Modern Roster Mods for PS1 Pawapuro
I’ve got some more work to do on making this more accessible for English, which I’ll need to do in a future post, but check out the work from this Japanese modder, chanmida. Chanmida has a blog with work on modern roster mods for old Pawapuro games from the original PlayStation. Typically these are NPB rosters for new seasons including 2023, but most exciting is a 2023 WBC roster mod, with country names and logos and some custom uniforms implemented.
The names are written in Japanese, so without katakana knowledge you may not get the thrill of seeing David Fletcher and Jeimer Candelario’s name in a ’90s Pawapuro game. But check out these screenshots:
The patch files are all linked here. They’re protected by a password which is always pawaps1. Google Translate will be helpful for navigating through everything.
Chanmida’s YouTube channel has a video of Team US vs. Team Japan with the WBC mod in place:
The first few “introducing the year” videos are up
I set a short-term goal to edit together a short “the year is…” video for each year of baseball video games, for my Baseball Games sorted by Release Year playlist. Really this is just to visually split up each year in the playlist to make the sorting clear, so I’m trying not to put much effort into editing these. The first four are up now:
Hopefully these help show the diversity of baseball video games. And going back in time it’ll be interesting to see different ’80s games
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu Portable 2 (PSP) Gameplay – Every PSP or PS Vita Pawapuro game is a masterpiece. Plays great, goes down smooth.
- HardBall! (PC) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay. Finally getting into verified classic HardBall!, in this case the DOS version. They’ve only got two teams in this thing! But undeniably it looks great and plays great for this era of PC baseball game.
- Out of the Park (PC) Gameplay. The Out of the Park Baseball series started back in 1999, and the play-by-play commentary feature is awfully similar to how it still works today. Apparently the actual franchise mode is just about broken, with rookies never improving and virtually no trades being accepted by the CPU.
- MLB 08 The Show (PS3) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay. MLB The Show games can go on for a long time. This video has the same 1 hour 54 minute runtime as the Barbie movie. So far Barbie has made hundreds of millions of dollars and my video has 188 views, but there’s still time for mine to gain steam.
- Com2uS Pro Yagu 2024 (iOS) Gameplay. I always want to branch out into more Korean games, but they’re very often trapped behind some pretty tough region locks (several PC games require a Korean phone number to register and play!). But this one’s just plain available to download on the U.S. app store if you can find it, with the title entirely in Hangul.