Jaleco Sports: Bases Loaded review for PC

Way back in the NES and SNES days, I was hugely into baseball, which meant that I played whatever baseball game I could get my hands on. The likes of RBI Baseball, Little League Baseball: Championship Series, Legends of the Diamond, MLBPA Baseball…I sank countless hours into these games, and whatever else besides I found sitting on the shelves for rent at my local video store.

While I don’t remember them specifically, chances are good that, at some point, I played both Bases Loaded on the NES and Super Bases Loaded on the SNES. And, as such, it warms the nostalgic part of my heart to see both games re-released on PC as Jaleco Sports: Bases Loaded. But at the same time, it also leaves me wondering: how on earth did I play these games? They’re hard.

I mean, I know that a lot of the games from this era were pretty difficult in retrospect. But it feels like these two games are challenging even by the standards of the time.

A big part of this, admittedly, is that baseball games from 30+ years ago are vastly different from the baseball games of today. Notwithstanding the odd attempts from MLB The Show and the rebooted RBI Baseball series to add in retro modes, the fact is that they’re fairly user-friendly and generally pretty intuitive – and if they’re not, you can always play with the settings and sliders until they are.

Neither Bases Loaded nor Super Bases Loaded have any such features. For the most part, both are presented basically as they looked and played when they first came out. Unsurprisingly, that means both come with a bit of a learning curve as you get used to figuring out the timing for swinging at pitches, and how to throw pitches with movement, or even throwing to the correct base. Both games include instruction manuals (that capture the look and feel of the real thing shockingly well), and reading them is a must, but that doesn’t make either game any easier.

Of the two, Super Bases Loaded has probably aged a little better – but even that comes with caveats. It comes with difficulty settings, which is definitely a plus, though even playing on easy has the learning curve mentioned above. The graphics are obviously nicer, the field’s proportions feel a little weird, and it’s harder to get a sense of where everything is in relation to each other (notwithstanding a “radar” that theoretically tells you where everything is). Super Bases Loaded also has more teams to pick from and more players on each team, but seeing as neither game was licensed, it’s not as if you’ll be able to tell the players or teams apart all that well.

Nonetheless, as a piece of video game history, Jaleco Sports: Bases Loaded is a pretty interesting time capsule. It offers a glimpse at how baseball games looked and played in the infancy of the medium – and probably gives a renewed appreciation for MLB The Show for anyone (myself included) for whom Sony’s series has felt like it’s treading water in recent years. I don’t know that Jaleco Sports: Bases Loaded is necessary for anyone other than video game historians and baseball diehards, but I’m still glad it exists.

Rock It Games provided us with a Jaleco Sports: Bases Loaded PC code for review purposes.