MLB The Show‘s new cover athlete is…
On Monday, San Diego Studio held a stream hosted by Rob Flores (MLB Network) and Donovan Mitchell (Cleveland Cavaliers), to announce the cover athlete for MLB The Show 23, Jazz Chisholm Jr. of the Miami Marlins.
My first instinct was “Is it too early to put Jazz on the cover?” I wasn’t alone in that feeling. Yasiel Puig was a similarly inexperienced choice for MLB 15: The Show, though his first two seasons were absolute supernovas.
But Jazz was super-charming on the stream and his unique-to-baseball fashion sense makes him a good cover star too. He may not be the biggest star in the sport, but there’s a sense that he could be soon. And it’s hard to imagine a better guy to promote your game.
Derek Jeter is also the MLB The Show 23 cover athlete, it turns out
Later in the week, the Collector’s Edition, *ahem* Captain’s Edition was announced, with Derek Jeter on the cover. Similar to the Jackie Robinson Edition of MLB The Show 21.
Most importantly, this surely means Derek Jeter will be a playable legend in 23, the first The Show game he’s been in since his retirement (MLB 14 The Show). You can find YouTube videos for “HOw to mAKE JEETS!! in THE SHOw” for every year between then and now, so obviously he’s in demand.
We have a logo for the upcoming Power Pros game
Thanks to the Taiwan Ratings Board, we now have an official title and logo for the half-announced upcoming English-language Power Pros game.
We previously talked about this upcoming title six months ago here. Still no major details, but it sounds like it will be a multiplayer-focused slimmed-down version of eBaseball Powerful Pro Yakyuu released in English.
A mini-documentary on the Batter Up peripheral for SNES and Genesis
The YouTube channel Gaming Historian (by Norman Caruso) puts out slick and professional short documentaries on retro game topics. The channel’s latest video topic is the Batter Up, a motion-controlled baseball bat controller for Super Nintendo and Genesis, compatible with 16-bit baseball games.
I own a Batter Up for Genesis, which I’ll have to show off on video sometime soon. But for now, Gaming Historian goes into better detail than I would on the successes and failures of Sports Sciences, the company who made the toy. And the video shows definitively that the motion control is no more complicated than pressing a button, and doesn’t detect anything about the nature of your swing.
The channel last covered baseball games when it went into detail on the lawsuit over missing player names in LJN’s Major League Baseball for NES.
Big shipment from Gaming Alexandria
Game preservationist Gaming Alexandria put out a call to find new homes for a large collection of Japanese Famicom and Super Famicom games, so I heroically volunteered to give lots of baseball games a new home.
Here’s what came in, in the order in which they’re stacked on my floor right now:
- Two different printings of Nintendo’s own Baseball (1983). One uses the early launch game “pulse line cartridge” and the other in the silver box is from later on with a more typical Famicom cart design, copying the box art onto the cart.
- Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium Heisei Gannen Han
- Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium
- Choujin Ultra Baseball, the Japanese version of Baseball Simulator 1.000 (gorgeous and complete in box, too)
- Koshien (cart only but a nice one)
- Super Real Baseball ’88
- Home Run Nighter: Pennant League!!
- Hakunetsu Pro Yakyuu Ganba League
- Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 3 (gorgeous box)
- Dolucky no Kusayakiu (gotta love a Coke-branded cat baseball game for Super Famicom)
- Famista ’93 (complete and with the sticker sheet)
- Super Power League 4
- Famista ’89 Kaimakuban!!
- Kyuukyoku Harikiri Stadium ’88 Senshuu Shin Data Version
- Moero!! Pro Yakyuu, with some charming scratch paper still in the box with some passwords written on it:
