Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Prospi 2024-2025 rosters updated… to June
After months of waiting, a new update is here for Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025. Here are the patch notes, translated by poppo from the Prospi Translation Discord:
Common
Player data update at the beginning of the Interleague games
myBALLPARK
Release of facility level limit for BALLPARK
Addition of rate match to rank competition
Preparation for event
Other
Fixes for other problems not listed above
Rosters had not been updated since the 2025 update, unlike Pawapuro 2024-2025 which had received several roster updates in the new year. It’s a bit of a bad sign for Konami’s dedication to their shiny renewed realistic game series.
“Beginning of Interleague” means the start of June, so these rosters are still pretty out of date. There are several players familiar to MLB fans who joined NPB after that, like Luke Voit and JD Davis. We can expect to see some other new foreign players in-game like Oscar Gonzalez and… Struggling to think of anyone else. Not a ton of interesting transactions between the start of the season and the start of June, but there have been some real changes since then that still won’t be reflected yet.
This patch also still doesn’t include alternate uniforms, an expected part of previous games in the series which I think we can now fully give up on ever coming to this latest entry. Bit of a disappointment.
Baseball Prospectus article on realism in baseball games
A quick recommend for this great Patrick Dubuque article on Baseball Prospectus about realism in baseball video games. You can read for free by setting up a login on the site. (The article also happens to link to one of my recordings of a TV ad for Bases Loaded 2)
Patrick times how long pitches take to get to the plate and does some math to determine how fast the pitches in-game really are compared to how fast the UI says they are. Great experiment and a real “Wish I had thought of that” moment.
Checked Swing video on Simple Series baseball games
UK-based baseball video game channel Checked Swing posted a video summarizing the “Simple Series” baseball games published by D3 Publisher. Simple is a series of budget video games released in Japan mostly associated with the late ’90s and ’00s but actually still being released as recently as 2024. These games covered all sorts of genres, and spawned some legitimately popular franchises like Earth Defense Force and Onechanbara.
Basic sports games are a staple of these games, and this video covers most of the baseball titles. These start with simple simulation games with simple top-down 2D graphics, then move onto action titles with cartoony 3D graphics.
None of these are amazing diamonds in the rough or anything. But I like the simple graphics of the first titles, and there’s some kind of “Japanese weather channel” element to the menus that I also enjoy. Then the later games are amusing trash. After the first game in the series, each one includes full NPB team and player licenses, surprisingly.
Small quibble: The recording of The Pro Yakyuu 2003 Pennant Race has an emulation bug that makes the graphics look odder and worse than they really are. My recording here from the real disc doesn’t face this issue. To be fair, you do have to be insane to import a copy of this game.
Song of the Week
“Heroes” by Steve Martin (not that one), the NBC World Series theme. With NBC potentially about to take over for Sunday Night Baseball, we can only hope they’ll bring back a classic TV sports theme like this one.