Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
NCAA Power Pros 2023 beta out now
Raku from the Power Pros Discord released a beta version of his NCAA Power Pros 2023 mod, adding teams, logos, and rosters from the top college teams to everyone’s favorite cartoon Konami baseball game. You can download the mod here, and play it using the Dolphin emulator following these steps:
1. In Dolphin, go to Options: Graphics Settings. On the Advanced tab, make sure “Load Custom Textures” is checked in the Utility section.
2. Unzip the mod folder.
3. Copy the contents of the folder called RL8E54 in your mod into the Dolphin emulator’s /Load/Textures/ folder. Depending on your version of Dolphin, this folder will either be in /%appdata%/Dolphin/Load/Textures/ or /Documents/Dolphin Emulator/Load/Textures/.
4. If your mod has a “data” folder, right click on MLB Power Pros 2008 in Dolphin. Select “Open Wii Save Folder.” Copy and paste the contents of your mod “data” folder into this folder.
There are several up-and-coming MLB stars already from these 2023 college baseball rosters, including Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews on LSU, and Chase Dollander at Tennessee, as seen in the video above.
This is an early beta version of the mod, so there are certain textures that haven’t been put in place yet for some of the teams. But the roster quality and attention to detail is fantastic, and MLB The Show ain’t coming close to this list of teams. There are 32 college teams added:
- LSU
- Florida
- Wake Forest
- Stanford
- TCU
- Virginia
- Tennessee
- Oral Roberts
- Southern Miss
- Alabama
- Indiana State
- Oregon
- South Carolina
- Texas
- Duke
- Arkansas
- Kentucky
- Clemson
- Vanderbilt
- Miami (Florida)
- Coastal Carolina
- Campbell
- Oregon State
- East Carolina
- Dallas Baptist
- Charlotte
- Xavier
- Maryland
- Iowa
- Auburn
- George Mason
- Penn
There’s more work before it’s a fully finished mod, but newer versions will be added when available on the Roster Mods section of the 30-30.club encyclopedia here. Thanks Raku for the amazing work!
Prospi‘s 2025 roster update
The 2025 roster update for Pro Yakyuu Spirits dropped on April 21st, bringing the NPB rosters up to date as of January 27th. This is (perhaps not coincidentally) the day Trevor Bauer signed with the Yokohama BayStars, so, here’s what he looks like:
It’s definitely not a face scan, so it’s not a top-tier likeness for the game. The hair model they’ve gone with is also a bit ugly.
If you’re so inclined, you can compare him to how he looked in his last appearance in The Show, back in 2022. Though I’m not sure anyone really wins out in this comparison:
Nice to see free agent Bauer representing the league as a whole with his hat choice, a la Rob Lowe:
Bauer’s overall rating of 493 is insane, frankly. That puts him ahead of every other active NPB pitcher, and behind only the 2023 WBC versions of Ohtani, Darvish, and Yamamoto in terms of overall pitcher ratings in the whole game. Among the legend players, only 400-game winner Masaichi Kaneda has a higher rating, at 532. In the real world, Bauer so far is 0-3 in his first three starts back with the BayStars this year, with a 5.00 ERA.
My favorite new feature, added along with the 2025 update, is the Edit Share mode. This lets you upload your created players and teams for anyone around the world to download. Browsing the most-downloaded teams, you can get high-quality rosters for almost every MLB or CPBL team, as well as a ton of 2023 WBC rosters. The 2023 Czech Republic team is available to download and has pretty decent likenesses and attributes. This is an amazing feature for sharing rosters, and a huge motivator to play through the other modes and show your creativity.
On the disappointing side, there are no new alternate jerseys in the 2025 update. Every team is still just limited to their home and away. The stadium data doesn’t seem to be updated at all either, so ads and slogans around the parks are still stuck mostly back in 2023.
The park models they created for this game are beautiful, though. Check out my video here where I used freecam to explore around each park in the game, and see what lurks just out of bounds.
River City Baseball Story out now
The new retro game compilation Super Technos World: River City & Technos Arcade Classics has a huge surprise: A full English translation for 1993 Super Famicom title Downtown Nekketsu Baseball Monogatari: Yakyuu de Shoubu da! Kunio-kun. Normal length of title, nothing to see here.
It’s no small feat to translate: It’s not War and Peace but there’s a real story here underpinning the whole game, not just straightforward matches. And a text-only commentator narrates the baseball action during games. That’s a lot of text!
I’ve bought my copy and I can’t wait to dig in and learn more about this game.
MLB The Show price drops and an amusing/frustrating bug
MLB The Show 25 launched on March 18th for $70 on PS5 and Xbox, and $60 on Switch. If you have enough interest in baseball video games to read this blog but not enough to want to pay full price for The Show, your time may have come.
From April 23rd to May 8th, the game is now on sale for $50 on PlayStation/Xbox and $40 on Switch. This is a universal price change across Amazon, Best Buy, PlayStation Network, Xbox, anywhere you look.
I’m used to sales coming in June or maybe as late as the All-Star break, so this feels a little early for a $20 sale. Unfortunately, there’s no real reliable data we can rely on to see how the game’s doing. NPB data will eventually show us sales rankings that might tell us something, but not yet for March.
Anecdotally, while there’s a lot of frustration around the lack of graphical progress, it feels like word of mouth is higher on this year’s The Show versus last year. There’s some possibility of confirmation bias of course, but it also seems like interest in baseball generally has gone up: I know a lot of people getting into the sport this year who weren’t previously big fans of the sport (maybe I’m just aging into baseball’s core demographic).
Speaking of frustration, I enjoyed hearing about this bug via Reddit, which is already fixed in the latest patch for MLB The Show 25. Playing as a pitcher in Road to the Show, after selecting a goal that requires a strikeout, opposing hitters would put the ball in play on the first pitch 100% of the time. Or as the patch notes put it:
Fixed an issue where CPU controlled batters could make contact no matter where the first pitch was thrown.
This Reddit thread shows the ridiculous degrees to which you could pitch outside the zone and still see the same results. Obviously they didn’t want this to happen, but does The Show stack the deck against you when you select a mission in RTTS? I’ve been playing as a hitter, but it does sometimes feel like I get any result but the one I need to pass the mission…
Song of the Week
Not baseball-related, but I was pretty blown away with the first few tracks on this Gradius 2 soundtrack for MSX. Adding custom audio hardware to your games can be a powerful thing.