Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball

Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball

Release Date	July 1990
Adapted From	Softball Tengoku
Platforms	NES
Developer	Tose Co.
Publisher	Broderbund
Original Price	$39.95
Team Names	Fictional teams
Player Names	Fictional roster with some celebrity parodies

Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball is the North American version of Softball Tengoku, a softball game developed by Tose Co., a long-running Japanese game development studio that specializes in (often uncredited) contract work for other, larger game studios. It is one of only a few games solely developed by Tose, alongside The Legendary Starfy and Super Bases Loaded. The primary feature is a “schoolyard pick”-style of roster construction similar to Backyard Baseball, with each character having different attributes and special abilities.

Description

Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball has two gameplay modes: Two-player exhibition games, and a single-player tournament mode. The tournament requires beating five other teams, one for each park, to earn a fight against the all-girls final boss team, the Amazons.

With the exception of the Amazons, there are no set teams in the game. Instead, there is a draft before play to choose ten of the game’s 60 characters to be on your team. Each player can play any position, but their abilities vary wildly. Some players are brutally slow and should only play catcher or first base. Some have special pitching motions, and a few can even fly in the air, most suitable for robbing home runs in the outfield. None of these abilities are spelled out anywhere in-game, and most of them aren’t even explained in the instruction manual, so trial and error through multiple games is needed to find the best roster.

There are five parks that can be selected normally and a sixth, professional-style park for the final game against the Amazons. Generally, these are neighborhood-style parks with no real outfield walls. Each park has its own quirks and ground rules. For instance, at the school field, a deep fly ball that breaks a window is called an out.

The North American version adds a choice between fast pitch or slow pitch mode. Gameplay in the Japanese version is always “fast pitch” mode. Fast pitch plays like a normal baseball video game, except for only seven innings instead of nine. Slow pitch makes a variety of rules changes:

• Pitchers have to make looping, underhand throws. Press up on the D-pad when pitching for a shorter pitch, down for a longer pitch, A for a flatter pitch, and B for a higher pitch.
• Each team uses all ten men in the batting order and on the field, with four outfielders. In fast pitch mode, the tenth player starts on the bench.
• Any foul ball with two strikes is an out.
• It is no longer possible to steal bases.

Roster

Each game has a roster of 60 selectable players plus 10 players on the Amazons team that are only playable through passwords (refer to the Cheats and Secrets section below). In the original Japanese version of the game, these characters include animals, celebrities, and unlicensed fictional characters (Dracula, Rocky Balboa).

In the American version, all animals and most mythological creatures are replaced with fictional human characters. The ogre character, Diablo, is the one non-human remaining (if you don't count the witch). The American celebrity references are still there: Mike Tyson is Mikey, Carl Lewis is Louis, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is Arnie Schwarz.

Each character’s special abilities and behavior are still intact between the versions despite these region changes. So the frog character in the Japanese version becomes a human named Froggy in the American version, who hops around like a frog. Casey can float in the air on defense, because he was a tengu in Softball Tengoku.

Dusty Diamond’s uses palette swaps of existing human character art to fill out the now animal-less roster, so it can be harder to tell the players apart in that version. Rocky, Cap, and Josh all have the same face with different hair colors, for example.

Little Details

• Some players are better at night than during the day, or vice versa. Each game starts during daytime and progresses to night as they go along.
• Several of the players in either version of the game are switch hitters. You can switch sides of the plate by pressing Start then left or right on the D-pad.
• There is a strict mercy rule in effect: Any ten-run lead will immediately end the game and grant the win to the leading team.
• Games can continue in extra innings until the 14th. In the 14th inning, both teams start with one out and two men on base. If the game is still tied after that inning, the game ends in a tie (which is effectively a loss in single-player, since you can’t continue onto the next opponent).
• Buying a physical, cart-only copy of Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball will cost you a little more than the game’s original MSRP today. Box copies of the game cost well over $100 and sealed copies have sold on eBay for more than $2,000.
• Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball canonically takes place in Mudville, if you’re willing to take the back of the box’s word for it:

  Mudville was the sight [sic] of the classic poem, “Casey at the Bat“. But Mudville has another — and some say, even greater — claim to fame. Each year, the world’s finest softball players gather in Mudville to battle for the World’s All-Star Softball Championship.

Cheats and Secrets

• To play as the Amazons in Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball, enter this password: Lx340xq5w60xvmTRtztYKbmbJXTXN
• To jump to the last game against the Amazons in Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball, enter this password: LgtwwRG7mtdHTR7R941vOv24y342J
• To be able to scroll around and see the entire field when the ball is in play, follow these steps: On the player 2 controller, hold up on the D-pad and press A six times. Then hold down on the D-pad and press B four times. Then on the player 1 controller, press Select two times then press Start. Now when playing and the ball is in play, you can hold Start and use the D-pad to control the camera.
• The game has a hidden credits screen. To see it, you have to beat the Amazons then wait for your team to make a V formation on the field. Then, with the player 2 controller, hold up on the D-pad and press A three times, then hold down and press B six times. Then on the player 1 controller, press Select.

Magazine Clippings

• 

  Part 1 of a Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball review from GamePro, Issue 11.

• 

  Part 2 of a Dusty Diamond's All-Star Softball review from GamePro, Issue 11.

• 

  A brief preview mention in Electronic Gaming Monthly, Issue 13. The magazine had a recurring complaint about copycat games, calling them "me-too games," especially when writing about baseball games.

English Patch

A complete translation patch has been made for Softball Tengoku, available from ROMhacking.net here. This will allow you to play with the original roster with translated menus and player names.