OP Day
The two best days in the Pawapuro fan’s life: The day the game comes out, and the day the OP comes out.
This one isn’t exactly in the tearjerker department like a few of the very best Pawapuro intro movies, but it’s a lot of fun. This time the cinematic is themed around the 30th anniversary, with lots of visual references to art and intros from earlier games in the series, and a focus on OBs, former professional players.
Ichiro, Daisuke Matsuzaka, Hisashi Iwakuma, Kenji Johjima, and Randy Bass all make the cut among names familiar to MLB fans. And the intro’s climax comes with Pawapuro-kun pitching to the special new-look Shohei Ohtani model.
Konami also revealed the ratings for some of the legendary players coming in the new game, which are fun to look through. Randy Bass has S contact and S power, holy moly.
Quick thoughts on Diamond Dynasty in The Show 24
Is anyone else feeling the squeeze this year in The Show‘s card collecting mode, Diamond Dynasty? I have previously commended the series for not holding you by your heels and shaking all your money out like some other sports games out there.
I’m playing my way through full programs, completing every goal and earning every reward, and hardly ending up with more stubs (the in-game currency) than when I started. And my results from packs have been a little below expectations, with two diamond players after dozens of hours of playtime.
It used to be pretty typical to spend an evening grinding through program missions, earning reward cards along the way and enough stubs to get some major card I’m looking for. Now the programs don’t give a lot of cards, the cards are lower-rated than last year, and worst of all they come with hardly any currency.
Buying packs with in-game currency always felt like setting my stubs on fire, so I can’t imagine it would feel any better buying them with real money. So if the point of the crackdown was to get me to buy in (beyond the $70 I paid to get the game), then it’s not going to work. Instead, the result has been I’m simply playing less The Show this year than last year.
The card-collecting mode has always been a sort of icky-feeling dopamine treadmill, dangling an infinite line of tiny carrots in front of me to keep me mindlessly playing Conquest or Moments. This year they’ve kept the treadmill but shut off the dopamine. It might get somebody to pay up, but personally I’m out.
New Encyclopedia Pages
It’s a PS1 Pawapuro chunk this week:
- Pawapuro ’95
- Pawapuro ’95 Ketteiban
- Pawapuro ’97 Kaimakuban
- Pawapuro ’98 Kaimakuban
- Pawapuro ’99 Kaimakuban
- Pawapuro ’99 Ketteiban
- Pawapuro 2000 Kaimakuban
- Pawapuro 2000 Ketteiban
- Pawapuro 2001
- Pawapuro 2002 Haru
- Pawapuro Premium-ban
YouTube Viewing Guide
- MVP Baseball 2005 (PS2) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Took me a bit of trial and error to even find a way to do a simulated game of MVP. Turns out you can start a game controlling one team then immediately give up control in the pause menu. Braves vs. a really weird era of the Los Angeles Dodgers.
- Tango Tokkunchuu! 2 (Browser) Gameplay – I found this game in the Flashpoint archive of old Flash games, called simply Cat Baseball. Thankfully the game wasn’t too hard to Google and find. Just a little home run derby Flash game but plays really smooth.
- Nick Baseball Stars (Browser) Gameplay – Not as big a fan of this old Flash game, which is bordering on not being a baseball game at all. But the set of available characters is pretty good, from SpongeBob to TMNT to Korra.