World Series Baseball (1994)

World Series Baseball

Release Date	North America: April 1994
Platforms	Sega Genesis
Developer	BlueSky Software
Publisher	Sega of America
Team Names	Real MLB teams
Player Names	Real MLB players

World Series Baseball is a 1994 game for the Sega Genesis and Sega Game Gear. This started the franchise of Sega-published World Series Baseball games (later known as the Major League Baseball 2K series) that would go on to outlive even the Sega Dreamcast.

Not to be confused with several other identically-titled games:

• World Series Baseball (1982) - Apple II
• World Series Baseball (1993) - Game Gear
• World Series Baseball (1995) - Saturn
• World Series Baseball (2002) - Xbox

Description

The game has two key features that would have stood out from the competition in 1994:

• Full licensing for MLB and MLBPA, allowing the game to use real team logos and nicknames, representations of all the real stadiums, and rosters of real players with their real career statistics. Most games to this point had either an MLB license (real team names but fake player names, like Ken Griffey on the Super Nintendo) or an MLBPA license (real player names but only cities used for team names with no logos, like MLBPA Baseball), or neither (a completely fictional league, like Baseball Stars).
• An up-close, roughly catcher’s mitt perspective for the core gameplay, allowing for pitches to go up and down in the zone and not just side to side. Compare to gameplay video from MLBPA Baseball, released the same year.

Unlike most of its contemporaries, the game also comes with a couple of difficulty options that change up the gameplay: Batting Level and Pitch Speed. Both settings default to Rookie, and have harder options called Veteran and All-Star above that.

At the default setting for Batting Level, hitting is only timing-based. On Veteran and All-Star, the player gets a circular reticle representing their bat path. They need to make sure that reticle is over the ball when they make their swing. Pitch speed controls the speed of each pitch, giving the hitter more or less reaction time. There is no difficulty option that makes pitching to the computer opponent easier or harder.

A Speak & Spell-esque commentator talks over your game on the Sega Genesis version, a feature that stretches the console’s voice sample capacity to its limit. This feature can be turned off from the Options menu if you don’t like to hear a robot tell you what Gary Disarcina’s lifetime batting average is.

Little Details

• The pitch velocities given in-game are incredibly slow on the default Rookie pitch speed setting. Throw a fastball with Randy Johnson and choose the “fast” speed, and it’ll come in at 77 MPH on Rookie. On Veteran, the Fastball velocity is 85 MPH. On All-Star, the fastball comes in at 98 MPH. I would prefer to either not tie the in-game radar gun to difficulty settings. Or give realistic radar gun readings on the default difficulty, then adjust up or down from there as needed for the other difficulties.
• Great work was done to make each home park feel unique, from the walls to different grass colors/patterns, as well as unique scoreboard graphics between innings for each home team.

Magazine Clippings

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  A magazine ad for World Series Baseball in GamePro issue 58 (May 1994)

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  A rave review for World Series Baseball in GamePro issue 58 (May 1994)