Fish plays Pawapuro
A pandemic-era “Fish plays Pokemon” project branched out into baseball a few months ago, starting constant daily livestreams of various fish playing Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025, specifically the Eikan Nine high school management mode. The first video is linked above, and at time of writing it’s through 169 years of in-game play.
You don’t have to watch much to get the gist: One of several real-life fish float around in their aquarium, behind a grid that represents different controller buttons. The current position of the fish determines what button is being pressed. You can watch a video explaining how it works here. The video’s in Japanese, but the auto-generated English captions do a decent job.
So how have the fish been doing? Well, the goal of the project was to win the Koshien national high school baseball tournament. Over the course of 169 years, they… haven’t made it to the tournament yet.
To try and kickstart things, a decent team was created manually 100+ years in, but still no luck to this point. You can tune in any time of day and see how things are progressing and cheer them on though.
A new secret in ESPN Baseball Tonight
Starting at 14:11 in this video is a secret about ESPN Baseball Tonight, a game I played as a kid a decent amount, that I had never heard of, anyway. In the Super Nintendo version, you can enter a pretty complicated code to get a tessellated view of programmer Alex Ehrath’s face:
On the player 2 controller: A, B, Y, X, L, X, Y, B, A, R, A, B, Y, X, Start. Do all this on game startup after the music starts and before the screen goes blue.
Just a dumb little Easter egg, but I love finding this stuff when it’s been hidden and undiscovered for decades.
MyBALLPARK guide for Prospi 2024-2025
We’ve got another mode translation guide for Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025 from Checked Swing, this time for the MyBALLPARK mode. This is an evolution of owner modes from previous Prospi games, but with a lot of gacha sutured on. You mostly simulate games, or can watch them progress, then make decisions that build up your team facilities and training capabilities over time.
Encyclopedia updates
Some more work has been going on over on the encyclopedia part of this site:
- Two new series pages: Pro Yakyuu Spirits and Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu. See all titles listed at a glance and click the link to any of the individual ones.
- Each mainline Pawapuro game now has an article on the site with whatever video content I’ve already sourced linked in. More work to come on describing the modes available in each title, but man, it’s a lotta games.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Super No Crying in Baseball (PC) Gameplay – Been meaning to try this one out for a while and finally dove in as it became free to play on Steam. I had a tough time controlling my emotions it turns out.
- Kyuukai Douchuuki (Mega Drive) Gameplay – Strange story this one, as a rare non-Famista Namco baseball game, but still a simple little game with cartoon graphics. It’s got a world travel theme, and the game’s title is a pun on Yokai Douchuuki, a Namco arcade title kind of ripping off Gegege no Kitaro. The game industry used to be a much smaller place.