Four-panel comics with your favorite limb-less baseball guy
Thanks to actual Pawapuro Olympian KangGang for translating these 4komas, short four-panel comics and allowing me to share them here. These goofy comics were posted in the original Japanese by the Twitter account for the Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu mobile app, and each one is usually made in honor of a new Success Mode being added to the game.
Speaking of translated comics
I have a copy of this in the mail to me now: A translation of Bat-Kun (Bat Kid) by Inoue Kazuo, the canonical first baseball manga, released in 1948. It looks pretty freaking sick:
Out of the Park Baseball 25 is out now
As of today, OOTP25 is out. I wanted to call out a few new features that stood out to me:
- Honkbal is back, baby. Out of the Park is slowly adding back some of the international leagues they had to strip out a few years back. This year we get the Dutch Honkbal Hoofdklasse and British National Baseball League licensed and in the game.
- I haven’t seen how it’ll play yet, but OOTP badly needed to give you some control over player development, and it sounds like they’ve added that in a big way. There’s a new Player Development Complex feature in the offseason for making a small number of targeted player improvements. And coaching is now configurable for each player, to shape where you want their development to go at the expense of other areas. Super necessary.
- Catcher framing is now an attribute in the game, with the previous catcher fielding attribute moving into blocking. Could be a nice extra element to think about.
- For the Steam Deck owners out there, Steam Cloud integration will be very nice. It’s not out at launch, but coming soon.
New Encyclopedia Pages
It’s been a busy week, but there’s a tiny bit of new stuff on the encyclopedia part of the site:
- High Heat Baseball 1999
- And the main page is cleaned up and looking a little nicer
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Dolucky no Kusayakiu (Super Famicom) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Every time I even look at the box for this game, I wonder why I haven’t played more of it. It’s a super-charming game full of cartoon animals, goofy one-off moments, creative ultra-casual Japanese spellings, and… a massive Coca-Cola tie-in?
- Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball (Super Nintendo) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – Just a nice-looking game for the Super Nintendo. The intro has a little more attitude than the game itself, for better or worse.
- High Heat Baseball 1999 (PC) CPU vs. CPU Gameplay – This game does that 2D sprites made of 3D models thing like Donkey Kong Country, but puts all the sprites in a 3D baseball field. I’m not sure the look has stood the test of time, but it runs nicely.