Lost Media Meltdown
This week I started on a mission to find out as much as I can about Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball, a 2005 GameCube game that Nintendo announced, showed off at E3, apparently completed, and then delayed indefinitely and never released. The game still has a zombie Amazon account, waiting for the heavenly day it finally goes on sale.
If you believe the senior engineer’s LinkedIn profile, the game was completed and passed submission. But Nintendo shelved it regardless, apparently not wanting to really compete against Major League Baseball 2K6. The game has yet to surface publicly after all these years.
To give you a sense of how it looked, here’s the trailer shown at E3 2005:
There is some gameplay footage from E3 2005, from 2:44 to 4:22 in the video below, which definitely reveals a light topsoil of jank. The game looks fully playable, but seems to have some missing or very stiff animations. Nothing too crazy for an E3 demo, but this would have taken place after the game’s original planned release date in April. And just a month before the new June 13th planned release date.
You can find more info with screenshots and a producer interview from the era on the encyclopedia page I’ve set up for the game here.
As if summoned forth by my subconscious as I snoop around this bit of Nintendo lost media, the company launched a new legal attack on emulation this week. If anyone ever gets to experience Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball, it will almost certainly be through the magic of emulation. Social media may be a little biased, but it sounds like Nintendo’s case is based more on “we have enough money to bury you” than “we have a valid argument that emulation should be illegal,” but we’ll see.
If you have any information on Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball, please send me an email.
New Encyclopedia Pages
This week I’ve been adding more pages to the encyclopedia part of the site, mostly in the general Exile Interactive expanded universe while I’m looking into Pennant Chase Baseball:
- The aforementioned Nintendo Pennant Chase Baseball
- World Series Baseball 2K1
- World Series Baseball 2K2
- World Series Baseball 2K3
- Desktop Baseball 2 (gameplay video coming soon)
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Dynamic Stadium (Super Famicom) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Bit of a weird one-off game from Sammy and Eleca here. Baseball Stars 2 came out the year before this game, and you can kinda tell.
- All-Star Baseball 2003 (PS2) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – From back before Barry Bonds was banned from baseball… bideo games.
- Koushien V (PS1) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – This is just a nice-looking PS1 game. I can’t quite put my finger on why this Koushien series from Magical Company has the air of jank around it and yet every time I play one, it exceeds expectations.
- Baseball Tycoon (iOS) Gameplay – A bewildering lightly baseball-themed idle game. I guess the idea is you’re making a batting center and improving it over time. Pretty odd!