Welcome to a special Wednesday edition of the Friday Starter column. Too much baseball news going on to wait around.
Sho-Time for Pawapuro in 2024
The next Pawapuro game has finally been announced. And it’s not eBaseball or Jikkyou, but just Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025. I guess saying two years is long enough that they need to trim some other part of the title.
Not much in the way of details yet, and the release date is just “Coming 2024,” but a teaser page is on Konami’s site now and the trailer above gives a few small announcements:
- Success mode with a time travel/future theme
- Pawafes mode will include final bosses from former games and characters from other Konami games (Alucard, Goemon, and Pastel from TwinBee are the ones shown in the trailer)
- A new Legendary Showdown mode to take on famous former NPB players like Ohtani. Probably similar to the one from several of the PlayStation 2 games?
The fine print on the teaser site shows a new license not in previous games for the NPB Foreign Players Alumni Association. So it looks like some non-Japanese OB players will be added this time around. Kip Gross already confirmed his inclusion on his personal Facebook.
The trailer was shown in the Nintendo Direct Partner Showcase, but will be releasing on Switch and PlayStation 4.
And no, sorry, no English version announced. Or a new Pro Yakyuu Spirits game. Maybe someday.
Yeah Jeets
MLB The Show 24 announcements keep dribbling out slowly. This week San Diego Studio announced a new Storylines mode dedicated to famous moments in Derek Jeter’s career. Very curious if we’ll get some nice video content like the Negro League Storylines mode gets to go along with it.
A Power Pros avatar creator tool
There is a tool on this site for making your own Pawapuro-style avatars. It’s pretty Web 1.0, but that’s something I’m into these days. The tool is in Japanese, but Google Translate works well on it at least on desktop, and the tool is pretty self-explanatory.
New Encyclopedia Pages
It’s been a busy time over at the new encyclopedia page. Almost everything that was previously sandwiched into a bad WordPress post over here has now been moved over, and I’ve started adding some brand new pages:
- Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr.
- Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest
- Doki Doki Pretty League
- Necchuu! Pro Yakyuu 2002
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Necchuu! Pro Yakyuu 2002 (PS2) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Finally a nice back-and-forth battle on the channel, it’s been a while. These Namco games were great.
- Doki Doki Pretty League (PS1) Gameplay – Finally snagged a copy of this game and its sequel. Simple high school baseball management/bishojo game.
- Baseball Land (iOS) Gameplay – Just a simple iOS home run derby type game, but with an appealing dark fantasy JRPG style, sort of Shadow of the Colossus-ish in art and music. Not much fun really, but interesting!
- Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 13 (PS2) Gameplay – A re-record after an earlier video I uploaded for this game had some audio sync issues. Always fun to play some Pawapuro, though it really feels like the ball is dead in this one.