GTA Meets MLB
The internet is slowly losing its mind over Grand Theft Auto VI, coming in 2025, with hacks and leaks and speculation everywhere on the internet. I like the series too, but I’m a little mystified at the popularity of GTA Online. Anyway, here’s a little tenuous baseball-GTA connection that came up recently in one of my YouTube comments.
There is an in-game TV ad in Grand Theft Auto V, released 2013, for Logger Beer. The gimmick of the ad is these baseball players make millions of dollars and you’re some minimum wage loser, so… Drink this beer. I guess a parody of beer ads with lots of sports imagery, and the sort of disconnect there.
The ad is pretty clearly using animations from the MLB 2K series (published by the same parent company as Rockstar, 2K Games). The easiest place to see is to compare the batter hopping onto home plate celebrating a walk-off at 0:25 to the walk-off homer clip below. The teammate animations are very slightly randomized, but it’s pretty identical to 0:40 in the clip below.
On digging in a little further, the ballpark is Spring Training Facility 2 (the Grapefruit League one), but with all the ad billboard graphics replaced:
I wasn’t able to find any official acknowledgement of the borrowed engine anywhere online or in the GTA V credits. If you know anything more, please leave a comment!
Pawapuro and Prospi Anniversary
A new Konami webpage appeared to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Pawapuro (Powerful Pro Yakyuu) series and the 20th anniversary of Prospi (Pro Yakyuu Spirits). Gematsu has an English-language news page on it here.
There are no specific announcements on the page yet, besides that announcements will be coming for all their currently-supported live service games, plus more.
Like I said last week, we are due for a new mainline Pawapuro game this year. Pro Yakyuu Spirits is harder to predict, with the previous mainline games in the series coming in 2021, 2019, and 2015. Crossing my fingers for new mainline games in both series to celebrate their anniversaries.
Some ongoing projects
A look ahead to some projects for 2024 at 30-30.club:
- “The year is…” videos, to add to the baseball video games by release year playlist on YouTube. These will be little 30-second videos with clips from various games released year by year along with a real-life baseball highlight. These will help make the playlist more readable so you can tell which games released which year, and should hopefully be fun little things to watch.
- Encyclopedia migration to MediaWiki. I’ve been slow to add new encyclopedia pages to this site, as I’ve been fighting with WordPress a little. I want more multimedia elements and some good automatic categorization and table of contents, etc. This is possible with WordPress but easier with MediaWiki. This will also help me open the encyclopedia up to new contributors eventually if I ever get less particular about it.
Check out a preview page of the new encyclopedia format here.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- World League Baseball (PC) Gameplay. I promised in my 2023 round-up I would get to it quickly, and here it is. This is a Korean-made PC baseball game on Steam with a really nice cartoon art style. The dev’s previous work is mostly mobile free-to-play games, and this one certainly has some currencies despite not being free. Will dig into the game a little more and try the World League mode and some online to see if I’m really into it.
- MLB 13 The Show (Vita) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay. The performance isn’t incredible but this sure is a nice-looking game for having come out a decade ago on a handheld!