Power Pros is in English on consoles for the first time since 2008, in a bite-sized format
True to the initial reports back in August last year, Konami has released a new baseball game in English: WBSC eBaseball Power Pros is the name, and it came out on Wednesday afternoon for PS4 and Switch.
The game was shown off in a “blink and you’ll miss it” mention towards the end of the Nintendo Direct on Wednesday, with a “Later Today” release date. Sure enough, within a few hours the game was out on Switch, then a few hours later on PlayStation 4.
Lots of surprising elements to the game:
- A micro-budget $1 price point
- No licensed players for any leagues, despite the WBSC branding (World Baseball and Softball Confederation, the organization that hosts the World Baseball Classic)
- Instead, players create custom rosters of Success Mode characters from previous Pawapuro games. It’s a pretty big roster that expands as you collect new characters from playing online.
- This is very much a multiplayer-focused game, with Championship (based on the same mode from standard Pawapuro games), Versus, Practice, and Tournament being the only gameplay modes.
The game is a lot of fun to play. But be aware that the localization is minimal. The commentary and few lines of character VO are Japanese-only. All English fonts are monospace, like English text inside a Japanese game (it looks odd, trust me). But at that price point, and after 15 years of waiting for a U.S. (and Europe, and lots of other places) release, it’s been awesome to see.
Twitter was full of rumors about a new Mario Baseball game from Bandai Namco going into the Direct also, which would be the first entry in that series since either 2017’s Mario Sports Superstars or 2008’s Mario Super Sluggers depending on how you feel about the former. But no such game was announced.
Negro Leagues content coming to MLB The Show
We’re square in the middle of baseball game news season, and this week didn’t disappoint. San Diego Studio announced on Monday that Negro Leagues players are coming to MLB The Show 23 and future games in the series, along with a new “Storylines” mode.
The new mode sounds similar to Moments, but with more tailored video content that goes into the history of these players and their journeys. MLB The Show is working with the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in making this content.
The players announced so far who will be part of what they’re calling Season 1 of the Storylines mode: Satchel Paige, Jackie Robinson, Buck O’Neil, Hank Thompson, Hilton Smith, John Donaldson, Rube Foster, and Martín Dihigo. The plan is to feature stories on a separate set of players in next year’s game, going out for what is currently planned as a five-year feature.
It remains to be seen exactly what this mode will look like, but I found this really exciting. The historical content has always been a potential area for improvement in The Show for me. Playing in the Polo Grounds is great, and the handful of legends are okay but feel under-utilized. I really wish The Show could add select historical teams rather than just individual players.
Six Negro League stadiums are coming, San Diego Studio announced in a follow-up video:
- Muehlebach Field – Kansas City Monarchs 1923-1948
- Hilldale Park – Darby, PA 1929-1932
- South Side Park – Chicago, IL 1929-1932
- Comiskey Park – Chicago, IL 1911-1951
- Forbes Field – Pittsburgh, PA 1922-1939 (this was already in MLB The Show games but is hopefully being updated)
- Bush Stadium – Indianapolis, IN 1922-1939
Subtitles for the first episode of the Pawapuro anime
If you’re a Power Pros fan interested in getting the gist of the storyline, fan-made English subtitles are available for the first episode of the Pawapuro web anime here. You press play on the YouTube video and the subtitles appear beneath the video on the Loadtup page. Get to know Yabe, Subaru, Hoshi, and the gang.
This anime was released about a year ago on Konami’s YouTube channel. No official subtitles are available, and no fan-made subtitles are available yet for episodes 2-4.
Blaseball is gone again
We last reported on Blaseball in mid-January, making note of the fictional baseball league-watching simulator’s relaunch. Since then, the site has had some server issues and bugs, and on Friday they sent out an email and took the site down for some indefinite period of time:
Hey Blaseball Fans,
We’ve spent the last year planning for the future, building and rebuilding the Sim, and figuring out how to run Blaseball in a way that’s sustainable for us as a team. Finally, after that long hiatus, Blaseball returned with a new Era. Rejoice!
…But that rejoicing quickly turned into some confusion and frustration. Put plainly, even with all the work we did, we still didn’t get Blaseball to where we wanted it to be for this launch.
Our hope was to be able to iterate and improve post-launch, but as we tried to do that, we realized it just wasn’t realistic for the amount that needed to be done. And it was negatively impacting your experience. We need to make improvements. We’ve heard your concerns about things like accessibility, missing features, site navigation and performance issues, and often found you saying the exact same things we were saying to each other.
In order to get the game where it needs to be, we’re pausing the Era for now. This is NOT going to be a repeat of our last Siesta — we are going to come back as soon as possible.
We’re really excited about the Era of Blaseball we have planned for you. What you’ve seen so far is only the tiniest tip of the iceberg.
We’ll be posting & emailing you weekly updates as we make these improvements.
Stay tuned.
The Game Band
I like the idea of Blaseball but was disappointed by the lack of new features with the big relaunch this year. It sounds like this is more about improving stability than creating new features, but hopefully it gets to a good place.