Baseball mods to grab before ROMHacking.net dies

 August 9, 2024  Posted in Friday Starter 175 Views

The end of an era for ROM hacks

Due to some old-school internet drama, ROMhacking.net is in the process of shutting down. This website has long been the place for mods, translations, and hacks for retro games. Little personal projects that are otherwise so easy to get stuck in tiny little corners of the internet were collated and celebrated on this website, and it’s a shame it’s going away. The files themselves will be going up on Archive.org, reportedly, but that won’t save the site’s key feature, discoverability.

Here’s a quick glance at the coolest baseball-relevant stuff on the site. I’ll be moving a lot of this into other storage to share on the encyclopedia part of my website soon.

Umpiring game coming out in 2025

I’m attracted to the idea of an umpiring game. I can concede it’s too niche to be the focus of some big AAA game, but still, I want to get good at calling a game. And it’s a topic that could have a lot of personality, with fights and sniping from the dugout and yelling your own ball-strike calls. If the catcher gets hit in the nuts, you should get bonus points for hitting R3 to take a minute dusting off the plate.

The new Pawapuro has a minigame where you call balls and strikes. It’s sort of damning with faint praise to say it’s the second-best minigame in the Pawafes mode. And I’ve recorded a mobile game called The Golden Umpire 2 which was okay. It was crudded up with mobile game ads and the gameplay outside of calling balls and strikes got really repetitive. What I mean is, I think there’s a good game to be made here and I don’t think anyone’s nailed it yet.

Well solo dev Azeem Bande-Ali is going for it with The Ump Show, a promising-looking umpiring game with a Steam page and a 2025 release date. There’s a browser demo on the game’s website which I think plays really well. You’re hit with an interesting game design twist right away: Your goal is to both get the calls right to fill your “integrity meter” and to help the visiting team win. There are interesting decisions to make while you’re trying to visualize where the ball went over the plate.

It would need a lot more to make a full game, but I was happy to see this Steam listing.

Mercari U.S. is kinda trash now

As someone who buys a lot of old baseball games, I end up being close friends with the Mercari and eBay apps on my phone. About a month ago, Mercari made a big change to their U.S. store that may have well and truly ruined it.

Mercari is a Japanese company, and I’ve bought my fair share from their Japanese store through Buyee in the past. But the U.S. listings were totally separate, until a few weeks ago. Now, all Japanese listings where the seller approved selling to international buyers are chucked right into the app, with A.I.-translated item descriptions and a heeeffffty shipping cost, some fees, and seemingly extra fees hidden inside the item price. Por ejemplo:

Original listing on Mercari Japan:

Same listing on Mercari U.S.:

The original price of 300 yen ($2.15 with the weak yen right now) magically transforms into $8.37 on the U.S. store. Mercari Japan is officially partnered with Buyee for overseas buyers, as you can see in the top screenshot, which will charge a still-slightly-annoying 300 yen service fee on every purchase. That still only gets you to $4.15. And in my experience, the shipping cost is about $10 per item from Buyee, which easily beats the $18.00 which is the lowest price I’ve seen on the Mercari U.S. store.

Okay, so ignore these dumb listings and buy from Buyee, you might say. But for sickos like me with saved searches for “baseball video game” or “famista encyclopedia” or something like that, I’m now deluged with hundreds of crazy-price Japanese listings. You can filter out Japanese listings, but this has to be manually done after opening the search, and it removes the “New” icon on the new items that came up in your search. I am now better off manually typing in “baseball video game” every morning and trying to remember if I already saw that same grody copy of Ken Griffey for the N64 yesterday or not.

Combine that with the increasingly non-existent customer support for U.S. Mercari, and you get the sense that it’s down to just a boiler room operation, maybe not long for this continent. It’s the auction site equivalent of filling up GameStops with T-shirts and Funko pops to save on the inventory costs of stocking actual video games.

YouTube Viewing Guide

  • The big project this week was a full playthrough of the Pawafes mode in the new Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2024-2025. The changes to the mode this year have been controversial, so consider this service journalism to see it for yourself before you buy.
  • Critterball Derby. Virtually zero people have seen the video, and I can’t blame them for the amateur-looking graphics in the thumbnail. And don’t get me wrong, the game isn’t good. But it’s got something I really enjoyed. I called it “outsider art” in the video description, and I’ll stand by that. Don’t blame anyone for not having the patience to see it themselves, but I had a good time.
  • 2D Baseball Derby. This is a good game! Steam has somehow buried it, because I don’t know how many times I’ve searched Steam for “baseball” but didn’t see this 2021 game until a few weeks ago. It’s only $2 and it’s got personality and interesting game design ideas. This game would have hit so good playing two-player in a high school computer lab.
  • Jitsuryoku!! Pro Yakyuu. If you want to see what Bases Loaded would have looked like with more graphical power, this is exactly that.