Title: Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball (だるめしスポーツ店 or Darumeshi Sports-ten, transl. “Darumeshi Sports Shop”)
Platform: Nintendo 3DS (digital release only)
Release Date: August 8th, 2013 (Japan), April 3rd, 2014 (North America), May 28th, 2014 (Korea)
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Release Price: Free-to-play (“free-to-start” was Nintendo’s preferred name for this pricing model at the time)
Never let it be said that Nintendo hasn’t tried to innovate in the video game business. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball is a game about a depressed, over-the-hill former baseball player and talking dog named Rusty Slugger, who finds himself running a sporting goods store and raising ten children by himself. You play as Rusty’s sole customer, haggling with him to buy in-fiction video games with real money.
Gameplay Video
Description
From the game’s main menu, you can choose either Play or Shop. Shop takes you to Rusty’s sporting goods store, where he also sells baseball-themed video games. The player can buy these video games, which unlock new minigames in the Play mode. In Shop mode, the player can buy their choice of the baseball minigames on offer. Rusty sets an initial asking price of $4.00. The player can, if they choose, immediately buy the minigame at full asking price, with real money. Or the player can choose to Haggle, which starts a dialogue tree with Rusty.
In this dialogue tree, the player is given choices of what to say to Rusty, and certain choices can make him happy and others can make him sad. If something the player says makes Rusty sad, the haggling ends and the player has to start the dialogue over. If Rusty is happy, he will usually lower the price of the minigame. The player also has inventory items, usually earned from playing minigames, that can make Rusty happy. At any point, the player can decide to stop haggling and pay real money for the minigame.
Eventually, the game makes it clear that Rusty can’t be haggled down any further, generally at a little under $2.00 (the minimum price varies a little as the story goes on).
Advancing in the story requires buying minigames. A player who feels content having purchased the only three minigames they’re interested in playing will never see the game’s ending, and will be forever reminded at the top of the main menu screen that they are only in Chapter 4. The game is now more challenging than it used to be: Nintendo’s 3DS digital store no longer takes credit cards as they are phasing out the old console. Eventually, it will be impossible to complete the game the intended way. (Pirates and/or video game preservation enthusiasts have found ways to complete the game start-to-finish without paying).
Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball received a video game review in The New York Times, marveling over its unique diegetic price structure. The headline “Where Winners Play, and Losers Pay” implies that you have to be good at the game in order to pay the minimum amount for each minigame, but that’s misleading. The Shop mode dialogue puzzles are very simple, and you only have to beat a very small percentage of the minigame challenges in order to unlock everything. The main obstacle is being willing to spend ~$20 and repeatedly navigate the laborious 3DS store checkout process.
Oh right, the minigames. There are ten different in-fiction video games, all baseball-themed. None are so detailed as to involve playing a full game of baseball. They all focus on parts of baseball, like hitting, pitching, fielding, or even making a bat. The minigames are split into challenge levels and high-score derbies. In the challenge levels, you have a defined goal, like hit five home runs without a swing and miss. The high score derbies test your skills, giving you a grade rating and high score to try and play again and again to improve. Getting an A or above in a high score derby unlocks a new outfit for your Mii to wear in the game.
Minigames
- Make the Call – A wide variety of touchscreen games all played from behind home plate: First are several variations of minigames that involve quickly calling whether pitches are balls or strikes. Then there are minigames for identifying the types of pitches being thrown to you (fastball, slider, etc.). Then another minigame asks you to identify what number has been written on baseballs being pitched to you, rotating through the air.
- Cage Match – Minigames set in a batting cage where you need to time your swing to hit various pitch types thrown by a pitching machine.
- Feel the Glove – Two different types of fielding minigame. The first is a surprisingly realistic-feeling first-person minigame where you catch high pop-ups by moving your 3DS to track them as they go through the air. The second places you in third-person behind an infielder, and you have to move left and right and sometimes jump or dive to snag groundballs and liners.
- Drop & Pop – Hit a stack of tires one-by-one by quickly pressing the button you see on each tire.
- Bat & Switch – Similar to Cage Match, but at a different angle, with balls being tossed to you from close-range rather than shot from a pitching machine. One of the minigames involves timing your swing to hit the baseballs at UFOs.
- The Aim Game – Two types of minigames involving aiming at large targets: One, in which you’re throwing the ball, aiming by moving your 3DS in first-person. Two, in which you’re hitting balls thrown to you and need to time your swing earlier or later to aim the batted ball at the targets.
- Quick Catch – A first-person game where you move your glove with the analog stick to catch balls as they are hit towards you.
- Volley Bats – You control two batters standing across from each other, timing their swings to try and keep a ball in the air between them.
- Gear Games – A combination of two types of minigame: One where you juggle a ball on a bat by physically moving your 3DS left and right around you to aim and then popping it up slightly to hit the ball. And another type of minigame where you swipe your stylus quickly across the screen to clean fielding gloves.
- Bat Master – In this minigame, you can make bats that you will use in the batting minigames. A bat is spinning on a lathe, and you use your stylus to cut away at bits of it, choosing the shape the bat would be. Certain shapes will perform better in the batting minigames than others.
Little Details
- In the Japanese version of the game, Rusty Slugger is called Darumeshi Inuji (you could loosely translate his name as Doggone Dalmatie (as in Dalmatian, slightly truncated)), with a different character design. There’s no official reason from Nintendo for the unusual change in character design between regions, but the Inuji design resembles World War II-era racial caricatures of Japanese people. A picture of Inuji can be found below in the Screenshots.
- Rusty’s favorite food in the North American version is donuts. Inuji’s favorite food in the Japanese version is boiled eggs.
- The four optional, non-story-crucial minigames can only be discounted through discount coupons. There are only a few extra discount coupons beyond what is needed to get each of these games to the minimum price of $1.50. It is possible to waste discount coupons by, for example, getting a game down to $1.80 then using a $1.00 Off coupon, which only lowers the price down to $1.50.
- Getting every minigame costs $16 total if you get a full discount on each game. The total cost of every game is $40 with no haggling and no discount coupons. There is an alternate ending involving Rusty’s mentor Pappy Van Poodle if you decide to pay the full price for each minigame.
Screenshots
