Foul pursuits.
The SG-1000’s second Champion sports title introduces to the console one of the great inevitabilities of any American or Japanese game system: baseball. That Sega released a baseball game so early in the SG-1000’s life should come as no surprise; America’s so-called favorite pastime is in fact one of the great unifying forces between our respective nations.
As the follow-up to Champion Tennis, Champion Baseball cements the running theme that Sega’s Champion titles arrive just at the cusp of the maturation of their respective genres, which made them feel very of-the-moment at the time of their debut and has subsequently caused them to age terribly. Video game adaptations of baseball, tennis, and golf (as we’ll see with Champion Golf) all came into their own with 1984 releases that established how those sports would work in video game form going forward, and Sega’s 1983 sports titles appear more as stepping stones in hindsight rather than as significant achievements in and of themselves.
Of the early Champion releases, Champion Baseball suffers the most from its genre’s rapid subsequent maturation. This feels like an entirely different generation of video game from the likes of Intellivision’s World Series Major League Baseball and Nintendo’s Baseball for Famicom [see NES Works 1985 & ’86], both of which would ship in time for the 1983 holiday shopping season in the U.S. and Japan, respectively. Only a couple of months separate this game from those breakout competitors, but the gulf may as well span decades.
Champion Baseball has the dynamic of an early Atari 2600 game or Epoch’s 1981 Baseball for Cassette Vision: A crude approximation of the sport that looks and plays unlike almost anything that would follow in the years to come. The likes of Namco’s Family Stadium/R.B.I. Baseball [see the upcoming NES Works 1988] and Atlus’ Major League Baseball [NES Works 1988] ultimately descend from Nintendo’s Baseball, and Bases Loaded [NES Works 1988] owes its inspiration to Accolade’s 1985 hit Hardball. Champion Baseball is a sport at its evolutionary dead end.
The entire game takes place from an overhead viewpoint. Rather than switching perspectives for the pitching segments, the pitcher and batter simply appear as a sidebar pop-up that obscures a portion of the left side of the field. You have a very small amount of control over your team: You can slide your player (whether pitching or batting) back and forth, finesse the movement of the ball, and time your hit. When you manage to connect with the ball, it flies lazily over the main fielding window, which offers no sense of scale to the proceedings. Fielders coast along the grass attempting to catch fly while basemen stand motionless, and the disproportionately massive on-field player and ball sprites make for an experience I can only describe as “approximate.” It’s about as bare-bones a baseball game as you can possibly imagine.
It’s easy to look back at Champion Baseball 40 years later and decry it as a waste of time, silicon, and money, but that doesn’t seem entirely fair. Sega—or rather, developer Alpha Denshi—was simply working by the standards of the era; indeed, according to Sega Retro, the original arcade version of the game became a sizable hit in Japan.
This means that Champion Baseball is an excellent baseball simulation by the standards of early 1983. Certainly it’s no fault of the game that the genre it belongs to was about to smash through puberty a few months after Sega shipped this cartridge—a fact that Sega fans wouldn’t benefit from until the SG-1000’s successor platform appeared two years later.
