Digging into the Power Pros KBO games

Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.

Get to know Pawapuro KBO

I spent some time this week writing up encyclopedia pages on the site for two rare mobile games from the Power Pros series:

• Pawopul Peuloyagu KBO ’09
• Pawopul Peuloyagu KBO ’10

These are the only two games in the series licensed for the Korean professional league, the KBO. Both got promo videos that remix existing Pawapuro OPs to include Korean teams instead of Japanese ones:

These are altered versions of the intros for 15 and 2009, respectively.

The games themselves look much simpler than the 3D intros above, but they include the Success story modes that really give these games depth:

Neither game has been dumped anywhere, to my knowledge. But a lot of game preservation work is being done recently in the space of “games for old flip phones,” so there’s certainly a chance. Gameplay video does exist of the ’10 version, which I found embedded on a Korean blog post and appropriated for myself:

It would be great to find some KBO baseball games, but they all tend to be like this in one way or another–Current games tend to need a Korean credit card or phone number to play, and old games often lived on servers and can’t be played anymore. Someday this one might come to light though.

Bubble Bobble-NC Dinos crossover merch

Speaking of Korean baseball, Bub of the classic Taito arcade games Bubble Bobble and Bust-a-Move appeared at an NC Dinos game, and debuted a line of crossover merch. The video above has English subtitles, so it’s easy for anyone to enjoy. The Bub mascot suit is especially immobile, so the video includes him struggling to throw a pitch even a few feet, and being pulled along a cart to get where he needs to go behind the scenes.

If you’re interested in the merch, be aware some of it has sold out already, but you can check it out on the NC Dinos site here.

Virtual League Baseball 2 ROM

Somehow I missed a cancelled baseball game surfacing earlier this year: Virtual League Baseball 2 for the Nintendo Virtual Boy. Time Extension wrote about it here, and the official ROM release can be found here. The game got as far as receiving an ESRB rating, but was never released due to the poor sales of the Virtual Boy.

On giving it a try myself, it’s a very playable 2D-style baseball game. The gameplay is very similar to the original Virtual League Baseball, but with a better pre-rendered 3D look for the players.

The original Virtual League Baseball came out in Japan as well under the name Virtual Pro Yakyuu ’95. The Japanese release has real NPB teams and players, whereas the American release is a collection of national teams with fake player names.

We know there was going to be a Japanese sequel as well, but that did not surface alongside this one. Planet Virtual Boy has the most info on the unreleased game, and what details are known.

Voice cast for the Backyard Sports animated special

After talking about the upcoming Backyard Baseball animated special two weeks ago, we now know several members of the voice cast thanks to Deadline.

The special will be called “Sticky Situation” and these are the known cast members: