Super Mega Baseball 4 review: a monument to the joy of the sport

It’s hard to imagine unless you’ve experienced it yourself, but back in the day, every major platform had baseball video game options. There have been hundreds and multiple baseball video games, which will sound like nonsense to anyone who only lived in the MLB: The Show era. But it is true! That’s how we used to live. With options and mostly without the full, licensed approval of the MLB.

There were MLB-licensed games, of course, but also those licensed only by the MLB Players Association and titles where the license was only for a real player, such as Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball. There were also completely fictional rosters, like SNK baseball stars or jalecos bases loaded. There was even a baseball game without humans – at Konami, they had been replaced by robots Cyber ​​Stadium Series – Base Wars. We had shows like RBI Baseball, Hardball, World Series Baseball, All-Star Baseball, Triple Play… There was even a game called ” relief pitcher where you could only play as a substitute. We had realistic simulations, arcade games and everything in between. Options!

It’s unlikely we’ll ever return to that era: games are more expensive to develop today than they were in the ’80s and ’90s, and The Show, like Madden with soccer or FIFA with soccer, owns the space in no small part due the edge it has over everyone else. However, the rise of Super Mega Baseball has ensured that there is at least one other worthwhile entry on modern platforms, and this one does two things: It doesn’t have to deal with the tedious annualization that can lead to a franchise’s popularity stagnating , and it’s just instantly fun to play.

Super Mega Baseball developer Metalhead Software (and now publisher, EA) doesn’t have to worry about releasing a game every year to secure a licensing deal with MLB and the MLBPA. It has its own players, its own teams, its own stadiums. Metalhead has spent the better part of a decade building on the 2014 original Super Mega BaseballRefining, streamlining, and evolving mechanics while adding new ways to play: Super mega baseball 3Franchise mode and its online leagues to name a few. Super mega baseball 4 has built even more on those stable foundations, giving you more to do between games and seasons – both on the silly and serious sides – and the result is another excellent baseball game that’s worth trying, even if you’re the previous entries have never played. or any other baseball game.

To the uninitiated, Super Mega Baseball is something of a cross between Backyard Baseball and Power Pros, with a blend of tight, sophisticated mechanics and a cartoonish, tongue-in-cheek humor that drives it all – the addition of Legends to the fourth entry brings backyard- baseball competitions added weight. Baseball isn’t as dull a sport as American portrayal sometimes suggests. The World Baseball Classic, for exampleHe shows that there is much more to the international game than just being solemn and polite. Baseball is fun! And Super mega baseball 4 revels in it, with said fun expressed in every pillar. The goofy player and team names, the catchy, serious (and magnanimous) way everyone is drawn, the sheer number of mustaches you’ll see, the audience’s excitement that baseball in this league isn’t just a man’s game but is, too women with equal rights – that’s all Fun. Real life baseball can be so much fun, both to watch and to play, and it’s wonderful that there’s a video game series with a fantastic reboot to remind us of that.

Super mega baseball 4 possesses the joy and energy–not the energy of vitality, although not lacking either–that one associates with minor league baseball, just the kind of skill and talent one associates with the major leagues. Even if it can often be arcade-like, Super mega baseball 4 also exudes a sim-like appreciation for the details of the sport. The difficulty slider allows you to fine-tune the experience, giving you more or less reaction time on the plate, hill and field, while also controlling how often opposing batters make you pay for mistakes. If you don’t know what an error pitch is, Super mega baseball 4 can teach you in a short time.

You can feel how the computer opponents learn from your behavior and adapt to it. You can fool batsmen or anticipate your shots, and that’s not a random reaction, it’s a believable reaction. The for the third time by the fine — a real phenomenon that suggests batsmen seeing a pitcher who is dangerously familiar the third time in a given game — occurs here when you don’t swap out your pitchers or don’t know how to adjust to batsmen’s adjustments can. The higher your difficulty, the less likely you are to get away if you miss a spot in the zone. But at the same time, knowing when to fire a missile causes batsmen to chase when they should know better – just like in real baseball. Everything may look and sound like a cartoon, but Super mega baseball 4 is awesome when it comes to depicting the symphony of small details and their huge consequences that define the sport.

If any, Super mega baseball 4 is even more real than the realistic The Show, mainly because these players, apart from 200 newly introduced legends like David Ortiz, are not real and leaves you with so much more room to project and fill in the gaps. The characters feel alive because their mood and health changes over the course of a game, series, week, etc., and this in turn makes them more or less likely to throw an evil shot at the corner, or throw a ball with authority hitting the outside of the plate and so on. Each of them can take you on a kind of personal journey through their struggles and triumphs, and the path that leads from one to the other makes the whole experience all the more enjoyable.

Not only did the struggling player put you in the lead with that two-run home run, but it came after a couple of games where you did everything right with nothing to show. And since you were there for all of those moments, watching them go from Locked In to Neutral to Tense to the point where they might even need a day off to try and get it right making this thing counts even more as it shows on the scoreboard. They can feel the weight they were carrying drop instantly as they watch the ball pass the fence, or a breaking ball catch the inside corner and freeze a batsman, and that will only make you more with the player and join the game . All from the same game that features both Ortiz and someone called “Hammer Longballo” on the cover. Super mega baseball 4 is full of goofy energy, and baseball is the perfect sport for it, even if it doesn’t always come across on TV or in the most “realistic” video games. And like every previous version in the series, this is the best digital version of the sport you can play.

Super mega baseball 4 was released on June 2nd on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Windows PC, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. The game was tested on PC using a pre-download code provided by Electronic Arts. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, however Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find For more information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy, click here.