Kunio-kun Baseball gets a surprise English release
What a great surprise: Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics is a retro port compilation coming April 24, 2025 by Arc System Works. There are lots of interesting titles included, but my main interest is one that’s never been released in English before, with a classically long title: Downtown Nekketsu Baseball Monogatari: Yakyuu de Shoubu da! Kunio-kun.
Originally released for the Super Famicom in 1993, Downtown Nekketsu Baseball is a baseball spin-off game for the series known in English as River City Ransom. The famous high school gang violence beat-’em-up game had several sports spin-offs, each with great style and a penchant for violent special moves.
North America got the dodgeball game (localized as Super Dodge Ball) and the soccer game (Nintendo World Cup) but never got the baseball game. That shameful past is about to get corrected.
Why not localize it? Take a look at the localized title: Downtown River City Baseball Story ~Play Ball, Kunio!~. This is a game with some lengthy cutscenes and live text commentary throughout the actual baseball part. It can’t have been a quick and easy thing to translate.
So it’s a blessing that they’ve put in the work and the game will be playable in English for the first time. Check out the teaser trailer here, and I’m looking forward to April. I haven’t recorded a full game yet, so here’s my paltry homer short, which is still enough to get a sense of the game’s wacky style:
Accolade Sports Collection brings back HardBall
Accolade Sports Collection is a bundle of ’80s and ’90s Genesis and PC sports games coming out next week for PC, Xbox, PS4, PS5, and Switch. Chief among the titles included are the typographically similar games HardBall! and HardBall II.
Both games were released for multiple systems, but one of the promo videos by developer QUByte Interactive confirms the collection features only the Sega Genesis version of HardBall! and the MS-DOS version of HardBall II.
These were legendary games at the time, with bright colors (depending on your hardware), great sound, and a gameplay style that felt both realistic and zippier than their contemporaries.
Oddly, the company-currently-known-as-Atari already released a Steam port of the DOS versions of HardBall! and HardBall II less than a year ago. I own that release and would not recommend it: It’s the most barebones port possible, less feature-rich than a regular old DOSBox install. This upcoming release looks like a different story.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Baseball (PS4) Gameplay – Can you imagine having the gumption to call your game simply “Baseball” after about 1985 or so? Can you imagine doing that on the PlayStation 4? Can you imagine charging $9.99 for a baseball game on the PlayStation 4 that does not include baserunning controls?
- Kyuukai Douchuuki (Arcade) Gameplay – I may be the only one who has fallen for the charms of this forgotten Namco baseball game, with a world travel theme that means we get balalaikas and vodka in the postgame show for a game set in Russia.
But a commenter shared this great tidbit:
After some back and forth, I learned the main arcade theme for Kyuukai Douchuuki has been used for decades as the theme music of a baseball bloopers show on Fuji TV. I had a ton of fun watching episodes of the show on YouTube, and was glad to hear it’s still going. What I would do for sports blooper reels to come back into fashion.