This was an exciting year for baseball. Shohei Ohtani made the title of this website look quaint and old-fashioned with his 50-50 season. Yamamoto and Imanaga made the successful jump to the big leagues as instant star pitchers, with Roki Sasaki soon to follow. And another much-heralded Japanese import was Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025, which lit up sports gaming YouTube with its gorgeous visuals despite the language barrier.
Like I did last year, this post will go over and give out a few awards for this year’s baseball games, as we can now look back on 2024.
Newcomer of the Year
Yerr Out is exactly what I want to see more of: Simple, creative indie baseball games. I’m an old-head who’s still not totally convinced anything’s ever been better than R.B.I. Baseball. The licensed player names will always be out of reach for indie devs, but why doesn’t baseball have its own version of Tape to Tape or Legend Bowl out there yet?
This game is more inspired by Mario Superstar Baseball than R.B.I., but it still comes close to scratching my particular itch.
Yerr Out has been a bit of a moving target, with frequent updates even after leaving early access that have changed some core gameplay since my video above, but it seems to be moving in the right direction.
Also considered:
Best Old Baseball Game of the Year
Namachuukei 68 remains my single favorite discovery as part of the work I do on this site. I put a lot of new time and research into it this year for my review over at the Society for American Baseball Research, which made me fall in love all over again. I also finally got my hands on a physical copy. I never get tired of seeing that looming talisman of black cardboard on my bookshelf.
Briefly, Namachuukei is a Pawapuro series predecessor by Konami, released solely for the Sharp X68000 computer. There is always a predecessor if you look back hard enough, but this is an early case of what the hitting mechanics we now call a PCI: You aim a reticle for your batter’s aim inside a two-dimensional strike zone. That makes it surprisingly modern to play, though for me the real highlights are the painterly pixel art style with realistic player proportions, and an excellent jazz fusion soundtrack by Yuji Takenouchi.
Baseball Game of the Year
Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025 finally launched baseball games into the current generation, four full years after the release of the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The visual feast promised by the early trailers came true, and Konami’s core baseball gameplay remains best in class.
The release wasn’t without its faults, and the game’s reception has been colder with Japanese players (who for whatever reason have never been so interested in graphical fidelity as western gamers). The game’s delay to October meant the first season in its title was nearly over before the game’s release. The lack of alternate uniforms and mascots are a step backwards for the series. And while importing a PS5 copy isn’t too tough, buying the Steam version outside Asia requires performing a many-step ritual of bizarre incantations, and bending a few rules along the way.
But once you have it, it works and it’s a shining example for the next decade of realistic baseball games. Tons of resources have popped up to help English speakers find their way around the language barrier. Hopes for an unofficial fan translation patch are dwindling, as the DRM continues to flummox any file hacking, but that doesn’t stop you from enjoying the gameplay and ogling the visuals.
This all comes in a year where the usual heavy hitters, MLB The Show and Pawapuro, both faceplanted. The Show‘s only real changes were new seasons of their Storylines mode, which was less novel and charming the second time around, and clamping an iron gauntlet on Diamond Dynasty to see how much money would squeeze out. They’ve since apologized and promised to listen and do better for next year’s Diamond Dynasty. That’s fine, but as Prospi has made obvious, The Show is overdue for a graphical leap forward and some rearchitecting from the ground up. You can feel the yawning weight of a decades-old code base when Moments and Diamond Dynasty have the same minor bugs year in and year out.
It’s maybe a miracle that Pawapuro 2024-2025 even came out in a year when the same team was making a Great Leap Forward in Prospi that released just a few months later. But still, this was the buggiest Pawapuro in living memory, and the tentpole Pawafes and Success modes were both huge disappointments, especially for a game marketed as a big 30th anniversary celebration.
Looking Ahead
The next year may be a relatively quiet one from the usual suspects. Konami is presumably taking a year off of big new baseball releases, given the “2025” in the titles of both of their big series. The new Prospi and Konami’s new mobile game MLB Pro Spirit raise hopes for a major new U.S. title soon, but nothing’s been announced yet.
San Diego Studio has already announced a basic feature set for MLB The Show 25, but nothing too major or exciting. There’s going to be an “expansion of quick time events” in gameplay? Not sure I like the sound of that.
Playground Productions made a big splash with their revival of the Backyard Sports brand in the latter half of 2024. They’ve already announced Backyard Baseball 2001 is coming to Steam soon. It remains to be seen how much of the MLB player and team licenses they’re able to keep for that re-release. They also have a brand new game of some kind on the way, with scant details to this point.
There are two indie titles on my radar announced for release in 2025: Bitball and The Ump Show. The former is a retro pixel game that may fill that Legend Bowl niche I mentioned above, though only currently announced for mobile. The latter is an umpiring game, which I’d be really interested in if executed well.
Metalhead Studios seems to be working on a football title currently, so we may not be close to a new Super Mega Baseball. Unless they get a full MLB and MLBPA license, or the work on that baseball engine goes into a realistic game, like a revival of MVP Baseball, it’s not clear where they would need to go next regardless. No reason for repeated regular releases on a series like that.
Technically Namco did release a new baseball game this year: Jujutsu R.B.I., a surprising miniature R.B.I. Baseball / Famista game with Jujutsu Kaisen characters. But they’re still surprisingly on the sidelines other than that, with no real new Famista game since 2020, and no new Mario baseball despite some percolating rumors. Perhaps the Switch 2 will be reason enough to get one of these projects off the ground, whenever that console finally arrives (rumored for March 2025).
I’ll be keeping an eye out in any case, while I’m also delving into the past of baseball games. Happy New Year to all the baseball gamers out there.