Super Mega Baseball review: hall of fame

In a genre dominated by big-budget console titles, most games attach to something familiar — a team logo, a broadcast announcer, a stadium — to create a bond with the player. Super Mega Baseball binds the player to the sport itself. It's an arcade-style sports title, with cartoonish players and mirthful touches. In its core, though, is one of the most thoughtful and balanced sports games I've ever played, "arcade" or "sim," licensed or not.

The imagination that went into this game is most apparent in Super Mega Baseball's pitching system, which elegantly combines the challenges of accuracy and timing as the pitch is being delivered, without resorting to meters, gimmicky gestures or visual information that dominates the screen. It essentially breaks down to finding the proper release point for a pitch, which determines its effectiveness and accuracy in real life, too.

Other baseball games take an approach to timing and release point, but Super Mega Baseball's way allows for more of the mistakes — some of them with happy outcomes — that influence a duel with a hitter.

It plays out like this: The player steers a drifting reticle toward his target, and releases as close to the center of that target as possible. The pitch then gets a numerical rating (0-99) based on its effectiveness. One may also ignore the target and throw it somewhere else, inside or outside the strike zone. It will be a weaker pitch, but the hitting AI senses these weak pitches and will occasionally go after them. You can get a hitter (particularly a poor one in a pressure situation) to chase a bad pitch, where that happens entirely at random in something like MLB 14 The Show.

Pitchers have two pitch types, one that's easier to control, but will never result in a high-rated pitch, and one that's harder to pinpoint, but if you do, it can be overwhelmingly effective. Against dangerous hitters whom I could afford to walk, I'd use the more accurate alternative to nibble around the edges of the strike zone. Power pitching is good fun when there's nobody on base, of course. It's also useful when you have to go after a hitter in a pressure situation. The layered approach gave me a sense of pacing my starting pitcher in a way that other games don't.

The best situation is when your player goes "in the zone." My catcher in the season-long mode goes in the zone whenever there's two strikes on her in an extreme pressure situation, and she has hit at least four game-winning home runs. Here's a fifth, in the bottom of the eighth inning, down two runs.

Super Mega Baseball also tracks "Mojo," which rises or falls during a game according to a player's success or lack thereof. All players start out with different mojo. It's important to get to a pitcher who has a lot of it early, so that they're not a problem in the later innings (if they're still around). But a middle reliever with a big fastball doesn't look so tough when he has puny mojo and a bad accuracy rating.

All of this conspires to give your players reputations and personalities as you take them through a season (campaigns of 16, 32 and 48 games, with playoffs, are offered). My second baseman has solid contact and power ratings, but his low mojo makes slumps a real problem. I finally benched his ass, tired of watching him ground into double plays.

The boosts are comically named — for example, picking up the "legal representation" boost delivers a mojo buff. Players can be given "celebrity date" or "reality show appearance" boosts in addition to super carbon-fiber bats or the "greased uniform" that improves speed. It all builds up to performance-enhancing drugs at the highest level (including a "horse hormones" buff with an outstanding icon.)

Super Mega Baseball's primary drawback is a lack of modes. There's no online multiplayer, for example, though there is local multiplayer. Although it has four richly illustrated stadiums, some might find the lack of variety repetitive in a longer campaign (your venue is assigned at random, home or road, in season).