Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Out of the Park, at the park
The latest mobile entry in the Out of the Park Baseball series is now out on iOS and Android: OOTP Baseball 26 Go! The buy-in price of $9.99 gets you 2025 rosters for MLB and KBO, plus a few historical seasons: 1927, 1984, and 2014. Other historical seasons are available for $.99 each, or $4.99 for a full decade.
Go is very close to a pure mobile port of the full PC game. Many of the new features are carry-overs from this year’s mainline game: new dynamic scoreboards, new military service time and free agent cash compensation features in the KBO, and improved scouting accuracy.
I love seeing a fully-featured GM game on mobile. It’s fun to watch games play out between my team and others while I’m half doing something else (my attention span is doing just fine, thank you.).
Numbers League Baseball
Numbers League Baseball is an in-development mobile baseball sim. How do you play? The batter and pitcher both guess a secret number between 0 and 1000. The absolute value of the difference between the two numbers determines the outcome. If the difference is smaller, the advantage goes to the hitter. If the difference is larger, the advantage goes to the pitcher.
It sounds sort of like a simplified Strat-o-Matic that you can play against a friend via iMessage. If you’re interested to learn more, you can check out the Discord for the upcoming game here.
There’s yakyuu and then there’s… yakyuuken
Being who I am, I tend to find big lists of Japanese video games and then CTRL+F for “yakyuu,” the Japanese word for baseball. Several times, I have run into games with some variation of the word yakyuuken. I quickly find out these are not baseball games. So what are they?
This (not safe for work!) article from Joey Wawzonek at thestacks.ca answered the question for me, delving deep into the history of Japanese and Chinese variants of rock-paper-scissors, which wound their way through culture to eventually wind up as a genre of pornographic computer game.
I’ll leave the nitty-gritty to the article itself. But basically, a Japanese Industrial League team popularized public performances of what would later be called yakyuuken (baseball fist), a version of rock-paper-scissors. The team would perform this over and over on tour. Over time, this practice became a popular competition for stripping or drinking a la strip poker, and thus, you get horny computer games where you play rock-paper-scissors against a virtual partner.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- “Jon Dowd is not my GOAT” by Kofie – More talk about Jon Dowd, the Barry Bonds replacement character in MVP Baseball 2005. Really just talk about MVP and what made it great, but structured around an argument that Dowd is not the best player in the game.
- “The Bigs Deserved Better” by GameDay – A video essay on The Bigs series, two games published by 2K that tried to supersize baseball action, with some interesting ideas on unique mechanics to speed up gameplay.
- Real Sports Pro Yakyuu (PS2) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Will we ever run out of PS2 baseball games? Not yet. This is a surprisingly competent title by Enterbrain, despite the very generic name and box art.