Base Wars
System: NES
Release Date: June 1991
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Ultra Games
Genre: Sports
It’s the start and finish of the Cyber Stadium Series with Base Wars! By the 24th century, baseball salaries had skyrocketed. We’re talking $2.4 billion a year for a lifetime .250 hitter. Of course, depending on inflation over the next 300 years, that might not be that bad. You see, as long as wage inflation keeps up with price inflation, there’s not really a big issue overall. If one outpaces the other significantly, we could be in for a bumpy ride. So the owners decided that the way to save money was to replace the human players with robots! No more egos, no contracts, just metal on metal action. How far can you go with the Cyborgs of Summer?
Pick from one of 12 teams and do battle with another. I’m not being facetious when I say battle, either, because you’re going to be fighting your opponent on close plays. You can rename your team if you’d like. There’s also a pennant mode where you can pick six teams to play in a small league. Progress is saved between games, but I couldn’t figure out how to set the teams to computer control, so I backed off. I took Detroit and took on Chicago.
Looking at the lineups, you see different player types. Your bots could be cyborgs, tanks, motorcycle bots, or flybots. I assume each of them have their pluses and minuses, but they all did the same thing in the game I played. And that is hit homeruns. Like 60 of them. I don’t know if Detroit is super overpowered, that would be awesome, or if the game is made with impossible scores in mind. Batting takes place in the proper catcher perspective and you can move around the batters box whenever you want.
When you’re pitching, holding the A Button powers up your pitch. Letting go when the pitcher is fully white will give you the most power. For most of the game, I threw super slow balls because you can control the movement of the ball up, down, left, and right. This helped me trick batters enough times to think it was a viable strategy. Putting the ball into play shows that AI fielding is pretty bad. They rarely caught anything and ran around where the ball would drop, instead. Of course, you may not know where your outfielders are because there’s no indicator to help you find them if they aren’t on screen. Luckily the AI doesn’t advance bases during this time.
The novelty of Base Wars comes from fights that take place on the base paths. If you’re safe, you’re safe, but if you should be called out, it’s a trip to the brawl screen. You’re equipped with a weapon that you use with the A Button and do a robot based attack with the B Button. You have to knock your opponent’s health down before they can get yours. You can try to trick the AI while you’re baserunning if you have bots at the corners. And if you mess it up, you can try to win the fight anyway. The only time I really lost a base fight was when they got the drop on me with a machine gun and stunlocked me. I won my game 74 to 10. With no real challenge, I called it quits.
Graphics: 2.5
The robot sprites while batting are as good as you can do with three or four colors. Everything else is… okay.
Sound: 2.5
Typical Konami sounds, but not their best work overall.
Gameplay: 2.5
Everything works just fine, except the computer AI. That could be better.
Difficulty: 2.0
Definitely broken, but in favor of the player, may be better with a human opponent.
Fun Factor: 2.5
I liked dinging homers all day long, but I would have been happier if I set it to 5 innings instead of 9.
Overall Rating: 2.4
Base Wars earns a C+. This is fine for what it is. It’s a different take on baseball, but it’s not any worse than the middle of the road games we’ve seen.