It’s currently a massive thunderstorm where I live and the power could go out at any moment, so let’s get through this quickly!
AAA Power Pros 2008 Mod
Raku from the Power Pros Discord created a texture replacement mod for MLB Power Pros 2008 which replaces team names and uniforms with the real AAA minor league names and uniforms from the time. It can be downloaded here. Pretty cool!
To use the textures with the Dolphin emulator, put the textures in Dolphin Emulator\Load\Textures\RL8E54 (you will need to make this folder yourself) then put the data in Dolphin Emulator\Wii\title\00010000\524c3845\data. Then enable custom textures in Dolphin, and you should be all set.
Digital Scouting Report – Shintaro Fujinami
On the day of his MLB debut I finally delivered footage of Shintaro Fujinami from Pro Yakyuu Spirits and Powerful Pro Yakyuu:
He’s a little different from Seiya Suzuki, Masataka Yoshida, and Kodai Senga in that clearly the Japanese baseball games don’t consider him a uh, how do you say, good player. He’s not in the Tigers rotation by default for one thing.
You can see the attributes that would make a major league team get interested: 162 km/h velocity (101 MPH), great stamina, and three strong pitches. But the control is F or G across the board and he has the ability that will make his control even worse randomly, giving him occasional disaster innings.
His MLB debut matched those attributes I guess: He looked really impressive for two innings and then had a meltdown in the third and ended up being responsible for eight runs. It feels like a skillset made for a mercurial bullpen figure in MLB unless major league coaching is able to pull a miracle.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Emmdotfrisk started a YouTube series showing how to play the Eikan Nine high school management mode in Power Pros games, up to an advanced level. It may not look like it at first, but this is actually a pretty easy mode to play with little or no Japanese knowledge. And it’s so totally unlike anything in North American-released baseball games that it’s a great mode to dive into.
- The Bigs (PS3) Intro
- The Bigs (PS3) Credits
- The Bigs (PS3) Gameplay. Not sure why I was so into The Bigs this week, but I was. Pretty fun game.
- MLB The Show 23 (PS5) Gameplay. This video has the honor of showing the enormous oversized jumbotron in Citi Field pre-patch. There’s something almost Lovecraftian about it. It’s so unthinkably huge that it’s a little frightening.
