Talking Translations
Due to my principled (or arguably broke-ass) stand against paying to play video games before release, I don’t yet have my hands on Out of the Park Baseball or MLB The Show as of writing. It’s very much the calm before the storm at 30-30.club HQ.
So I’ve spent this week gathering up information on all the translation mods for baseball video games. With the one exception of a partial menu translation for Jikkyou Powerful Major League 2009 for Wii, these are all 8-bit and 16-bit games that came out in Japan but not North America.
There are tons of fun games to explore here if you never have before:
- Major League is a Famicom game based on the Charlie Sheen movie, that was planned for an American release but never made it across the Pacific.
- Super Ultra Baseball 2 is a Japan-only sequel to Super Baseball Simulator 1.000.
- I Love Softball is a hilariously janky girls’ softball game for Famicom.
- And the full Famista series for Famicom is translated. I spent so much time playing the original R.B.I. Baseball, and it was crazy to me when I first saw these later Famista games, that take the series in a different direction from how it went in the west.
This is sort of a companion to my previous work listing roster mods, which has continued to grow on its own page as well. Some recent notable additions are these mods for the Wii version of MLB Power Pros 2008:
- 1998 MLB
- 2008 High-A
- 2008 Triple-A
- 2024 MLB uniforms
There will be more to add when MVPMods.com comes back online, but it’s been going through some issues lately. Godspeed, MVPMods sysadmins.
Ohtani in Fortnite
On Monday, March 17th, Shohei Ohtani is coming to Fortnite.
Ohtani is not the first professional athlete to join the large cast of celebrities in-game. LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo from the NBA received skins a few years ago. Messi, Neymar, Reus, and Kane are the soccer star representatives so far. F1 racer Lewis Hamilton made it in. Naomi Osaka, Patrick Mahomes… All huge stars, but arguably baseball was overdue.
Ohtani’s primary costume has a cel-shaded look that doesn’t match the typical art style for Fortnite characters. His alternate costume is a sort of sci-fi samurai armor with a more typical look for the game.
There’s no new baseball minigame as part of this or anything, so don’t expect much more Fortnite coverage on this site. But, little-known fact, Epic Games does have a baseball game on its resume, sort of. They’ve subsumed other giant hit games like Rocket League and Rock Band into Fortnite somehow, so maybe they could get back to the diamond someday.
Pro Yakyuu Rising, a new NPB mobile game from Com2uS
The world-eating South Korean mobile game company Com2uS is making a Japanese league game this year, called Pro Yakyuu Rising. Just like their existing KBO and MLB products (Com2uS Pro Yagu and MLB 9 Innings), this is a 3D graphics action baseball game with full team and player licenses for its league.
From all appearances, this seems to be a pretty straight port of those other games for the Japanese market. But it seems to have all the league-specific bells and whistles, with nice 3D-rendered NPB stadiums and so on. The game comes out on March 28th.
If you’re interested in trying it out, surprisingly it’s a bit more difficult on Android than iOS to switch your region. This blog post explains several processes for trying mobile games from other regions. The iOS App Store link for the game is here, and the Google Play Store link is here.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- The MLB YouTube account posted a video for the 20th anniversary of MVP Baseball 2005, mostly interviewing former developers and talking about the game’s legacy. The framing is maybe a bit awkward for the current MLB console game monopoly: The video talks about MVP as a beautiful, tragic game, made my people who really cared, but couldn’t make a sequel ever again because of exclusive licensing agreements… with MLB.
- Japan Baseball Channel uploaded a collection of real-life baseball clips that illustrate max-quality breaking balls in Pro Yakyuu Spirits. You can probably get the gist even without a basic familiarity with either Prospi or Japanese. It’s fun to watch a sequence of disgusting swing-and-miss-machine forkballs.
- Speaking of Prospi, here’s a simulated game of Pro Yakyuu Spirits 4 for PS3. It’s a nice-looking though not especially performant version of the game. I recorded this one using the farm team alt jerseys for both squads.
- Bitball came out this week for mobile devices. The early release has been buggy, but there are fixes coming soon. It’s a simple timing-only, batting-only game, but with a console game-like franchise mode.