“Friday Relief” is a weekly round-up of goings-on at 30-30.club. Let’s make a call to the bullpen:
- Jeff Grubb, a reliable gaming world news breaker, suggests that a new edition of Super Mega Baseball will be coming out in EA’s Q4 FY23, meaning sometime between January 1st and April 1st 2023.
Naturally, since EA Sports purchased SMB devs Metalhead Software, there have been rumors this would become an MLB-licensed game. Reportedly, MLB will not grant the license to a competing simulation baseball video game, but would grant the license to an arcade-style game like Super Mega Baseball.
- I found a PC baseball game on eBay called Wheaties All-Star Triple Play 99, which I had to have. Looks like it was a cereal box giveaway (comes with a full jewel case, so probably had to send in a few box tops for it). The front of the box calls it “a customized version of EA SPORTS Triple Play 99.”
It’s basically a demo version of Triple Play 99, featuring home run derby and 5-inning single game modes, with the other modes still on the main menu but grayed out and inaccessible. There are really only two teams, the AL and NL All-Stars, but they’re presented several teams in the Team Select menu in different versions, with different Wheaties branding: You can play as the All-Stars in Wheaties uniforms, or Honey Frosted Wheaties uniforms, or Crispy Wheaties ‘n Raisins uniforms.
The disc also comes with 50 free hours of America Online! Always need some more AOL trial hours. Here’s my recording of Wheaties All-Star Triple Play 99 on YouTube:
- After recording the clips many months ago, I finally edited and uploaded a recreation of the Braves 2021 championship in MLB The Show. Video below. I already have some ideas for how to do this better next time. Theoretically, it would be fun to do one of these for every year, always using the most popular baseball game from that year.
- Mail day: I got a nice big box copy of Backyard Baseball 2001 from Mercari US. Seems like 100% of the copies I see online are CD case only, so I was excited to grab this one. Hopefully it’ll work well in my Windows 98 Virtual Machine and if not, ScummVM should do the trick.
- Check out my YouTube channel for this week’s other uploads: More Japanese baseball game commercials like Super Famista 4, full games of MLB The Show 19 and 20 in preparation for wiki articles coming soon, and footage of the Switch version of R.B.I. Baseball 18.