Game: Sports Talk Baseball
Platform: Sega Genesis
Year Released: 1992

Pay attention, everyone, because this is probably the first and last time I’ll ever review a sports game. I considered Persona 2, Chrono Trigger, and A Boy and His Blob for my old-school review this week, but decided to mix it up a little bit and do something completely different. That meant playing the Sega Genesis early 90s baseball classic Sports Talk Baseball.

Actually, I don’t know if this game should be considered a classic, but my boyfriend assures me that it is, and unfortunately, he’s the only one around for me to test it out with today. This means two things are certain: 1. I’m going to get my ass kicked; and 2. I’m going to hear about it for the rest of my life.

The game controls are pretty similar to most baseball games of the era, which I’ve always liked. All you need in a baseball game are two buttons and a D-pad, so you can hit, pitch, catch, throw, and run. The reason I’m not a fan of current-gen baseball games, even though I enjoy baseball as a sport, is because in my opinion, they overly and unnecessarily complicate everything. When it comes to me and sports games, old school is the way to go.

Unfortunately, the overall gaming experience wasn’t as smooth as I had hoped. As a big fan of games like Baseball and Bases Loaded II on the NES, this was a little disappointing. The controls were not exactly accurate; throwing to first base might sometimes result in a ball going home instead, or even to third base. As an outfielder, throwing seemed to be slightly delayed, which often led to the other team taking extra bases. At first, I really thought it was my controller, but switching to a different controller led to the exact same problems.

In addition to wonky controls, fielding came with a slew of other problems. Players would randomly dive to one side instead of catching a ball, stop running for no reason, or just stand around for a few seconds no matter how hard I pressed the D-pad to direct them underneath the fairly simply fly ball I wanted them to catch. This naturally led to me screaming a slew of obscenities at my TV screen and shouting things at my players like “Why would you want to continue running towards the ball? Take a rest, you’ve done enough!” and “The ball is coming right at you, so go ahead and dive out of the way, moron!”

Batting, for the most part, was a much more pleasant experience, with one major hitch: the batters would sometimes advance an extra base without being commanded to, which could easily lead to unnecessary outs if the problem wasn’t corrected quickly enough. Other than that, hitting, baserunning, and stealing were fairly accurate.

This could have been a really fun experience if not for all of the control problems. The game looks nice for a 16-bit title, it features the real MLB rosters from the 1991 season, and it had an actual announcer, which is something I’ve never experienced in all of my NES baseball career. Unfortunately, the positives were overshadowed by the negatives in what ultimately became a very frustrating experience. It might be awhile before I try to pick up this one again.