ACA NEOGEO 2020 Super Baseball

Genre: Sports (Baseball)

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local), Online Leaderboards

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Review:

2020 Super Baseball is a futuristic Baseball game released on the NEOGEO in Japan in 1991 and ported to Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis in the US in 1993, with this modern release coming to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One in 2017, and then ported to Nintendo Switch in 2018. This game’s vision of the future of the sport involves cyborgs, land mines, and extremely high jumps to catch fly balls.

Yet despite all these absurd changes anticipating what the sport would look like in the far-off future of… er… 2020… probably the most drastic change here is the designation of a “home run zone” behind center-field. Or to be more accurate, the determination that balls hit into the stands behind left-field and right-field will now bounce back onto the baseball field and remain in play. This results in actual homeruns being a rarity, which combined with gameplay that generally favors the fielding team already, makes for a game where it’s generally pretty difficult to score… at first.

This is offset by the game’s power-up system where teams earn a running tally of money for good plays, which can then be spent to power up individual players over the course of a game. The result is that while teams will struggle to score at first, toward the end of a game the power balance shifts in favor of the batting team and the fielding team will have difficulty keeping up with their powered-up hits, even if they still rarely score a homerun. All of this makes for an odd dynamic for baseball, and one I’m not sure fans of the sport will appreciate.

This release of the game includes a new “Hi-Score Mode” that challenges players to score as much as they can in one run before seeing a game over screen. There is also a new “Caravan Mode” that does much the same, but with the limit being five minutes. In addition, this release of the game includes both English and Japanese versions, and gives players a decent array of options, including various display options, sound options, challenge modifiers, button mapping, and online leaderboards.

At $8, the Arcade Archives release of 2020 Super Baseball seems fair enough, and it certainly is an interesting take on Baseball, but not one that will appeal to everyone. The unbalanced nature of the game and its strange rules take some getting used to, and unless you’re craving an unusual take on the sport, this may not be the Baseball game for you.

tl;dr – 2020 Super Baseball is a futuristic version of Baseball with some unusual rule differences that result in a game that’s unbalanced in favor of the fielding team at the start, then unbalanced in favor of the batting team toward the end of a game. It’s an odd take on the sport, and while it has its charm, it won’t appeal to everyone.

Grade: C+

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