3D printers are cool
It’s shocking how much baseball game news we’ve had deep into autumn this year. You’re not normally supposed to release baseball games in October. But things are definitely slowing down now that the MLB, NPB, and KBO seasons are all over. Now we enter the long, dark winter.
Thankfully, there are still video games.
The featured image for this post is a birthday gift I received a few weeks ago: A 3D-printed 30-30.club logo modeled, printed, and painted by my brother. I didn’t make the logo in a 3D software, and I didn’t remember the font names used, so it takes a true artisan to make it look this perfect anyway.
Sorry for not dusting before taking the picture. All my desks and shelves in my house’s upstairs bonus room are exactly this dusty and chaotically full of tat.
The infamous Ohtani children’s book
On the same birthday week, I took a trip of an unspecified length to my nearest Kinokuniya, a Japanese bookstore that has a few locations in the U.S. There I found the Shohei Ohtani children’s book that was briefly infamous earlier this year, which feels like twenty years ago. This is Yakyuu Shiyouze! Ohtani Shohei Monogatari. Why is it infamous. Well:
The text doesn’t say his name anywhere, but that’s clearly Shohei’s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara on the right. He got into trouble this spring.
After the scandal broke, a new version of the book found its way into stores. This one isn’t my photo:
Ippei disappeared, like a former comrade of Stalin post-purge.
There was briefly an online auction gold rush for the Ippei-ful version of the book, but it’s ancient history now. Regardless, I’m excited to own a piece of history. And one that feels especially odd at the end of a fairytale year for the protagonist of existence, Mr. Ohtani.
New Prospi video round-up
Yee-haw! Are you fellers into Japanese baseball video games? ‘specially ones that look real nice? Ones that ‘r shiny ‘n’ high-poly, usin’ Unreal Engine ‘n’ such? Then lookit here, pardner, at some videos I rounded up fer ya.
[moving on from cowboy premise immediately] One annoying thing about the new Prospi is the lack of Lars Nootbaar on the Samurai Japan roster. Well, what if you fixed that problem, and also created players for the full U.S. World Baseball Classic roster too? It might look a little something like the video above, from Pro Yasai Spirits (a pun meaning Pro Vegetable Spirits).
There are other videos on their channel for loads of other create-a-players, like Ha-Seong Kim, Freddie Freeman, and Juan Soto, all with decent face likenesses and fantastic batting stances.
Is it possible to mod the new Pro Yakyuu Spirits game? The western world hasn’t figured out a way, but this borderline YouTube poop seems to have cracked into something. This video shows the game’s announcer Mitsuhashi Taisuke finding his way to the pitcher’s mound. He does have a 3D model in-game, but unlike the Pawapuro series, you can’t unlock announcers a playable characters without finding some way to mod or cheat.
I would guess that something like Cheat Engine is being used to replace the player model for the pitcher, and miraculously the announcer is fully modeled and rigged enough for it to work pretty well.
The video’s top comment is the IRL announcer expressing his gratitude:
There are several gacha-ish, Diamond Dynasty-ish modes in the new Prospi. Here’s a looong video from me going through a full season of the MyBallpark mode. This one casts you as the owner of the team, making some high-level decisions and simming through seasons. After playing through one full season, you can dive into the gacha and give Konami more money for digital player JPEGs, if you’re so inclined.
This mode doesn’t have much juice, for me. I like the ambience of the menus, and I like the idea of an owner-level franchise mode sort of thing. But there just aren’t that many interesting decisions to make, and seasons take a few hours to get through.
Hakkyu no Kiseki, on the other hand, is a crowd-pleaser. This is the high school baseball team management mode, and it’s very similar to Eikan Nine in Pawapuro. There are lots of people out there with little or no Japanese ability who get sucked into the NCAA Football-like recruiting and training mechanics of this mode.
Unlike Eikan, if you want you can play out the key moments of your team’s games, if you’re not into inhabiting the role of the manager directly.
The player likenesses take a hit in the transition to randomly-generated buzzcut high schoolers. But coming from an American perspective, it’s still pretty magical to see a high school baseball game that looks like this. At the beginner stage with your crappy initial team, you can see weeds growing around the backstop, and a low-quality dirt field. And the unique animations for between innings, the alternate crowd audio for a sparsely-attended high school game, and the air raid sirens at the start and end of games… It’s a gorgeous and totally different atmosphere in what is otherwise a game set entirely in pro ball.
The board game stuff that you spend most of your time in requires some reading ability, or a guide, or a Google Translate app to figure out what you’re doing, but it’s addictive too. What a great addition to the game.