The top five news stories of the offseason:
R.B.I. Baseball is back, but with normal-looking players
Everyone freak out.
Polygon
- Prince Fielder trade
- Instant replay and collision rules
- Yasiel Puig wears pink jorts
- Robinson Cano is a billionaire
- R.B.I. Baseball was coming back
Our sister site, Polygon, got the scoop from MLB Advanced Media on what R.B.I. Baseball 14 is going to look like. Are you ready? Oh man oh man oh man oh man:
AHHHHHHHH, THEY’RE SKINNY.
That is not R.B.I. Baseball.
That is not R.B.I. Baseball.
The R.B.I. Baseball I know is filled with squishier, pixelated Matt Stairses. Everything about this is an outrage. Rest assured, I was on the Internet within minutes, registering my disgust.
You didn’t want the original R.B.I. Baseball. It was kinda awful in a lot of ways, at least compared to what we’re used to now. You could bunt for inside-the-park homers in the original game. Sometimes, the computer would chase balls in the outfield until the end of existence. George Brett was right-handed. If a game like that came out today, it would be the Superman 64 of its time, endlessly mocked and remembered for what it didn’t get right.
That’s because of the limitations of the era, of course. For the time, it was a brilliant game. It had real players and it was fun. There was an LJN game that had real players first, but it was the worst piece of crap ever put on the market, or it was at least tied with several other LJN games. RBI Baseball was so danged fun. But you didn’t want the exact game. If you want the same game on your phone, you can find it if you’re even slightly resourceful.
Must Reads
No, you wanted two things:
- Roughly the same gameplay as you remember, glitches removed, and updated with current players and all 30 teamsTo remember what it was like before you got old and serious, to remember the days of Cheeto-orange on the D-pad, the days of running home from school because 9-to-3 life was too hard without electronic downtime, the days when sleepovers were an excuse to stay up until three in the morning and play one more game until the next one. To remember what it was like not to know what a 401(k) was or worry about nose hairs and back pain, to escape into that world like a time machine. Man, if I could relive my life knowing what I know now ...
So where’s our time machine, MLB Advanced Media? I was promised a time machine. I don’t even think I can get back to 2011 in this thing. That is not a time machine. I’ll bet when I play this, I don’t even get to go back and tell Mr. Wapensky that I became a professional writer in spite of him
That is not a time machine. That is not R.B.I. Baseball.
MLB Advanced Media was charged with an impossible task, and there was no way anyone was going to be happy. Still, I was thinking of a retro, 8-bit-style. Minecraft made a trillion dollars with that style, so it’s not like it’s box-office poison. They continued the Mega Man series without changing anything. Recapturing that look would have been good for the memories. But the game was never going to be a time machine, and we were always going to be disappointed. It was never going to be what we needed it to be.
All we have left to hope for is the gameplay. There’s still a chance it’s a good game. I hope it’s fun to play when I poop. That’s the only time I have to myself these days, you know.
See More:
