Courtesy of CoroCoro Comics, we've got some more to gawk at concerning the once-named Super Mario Stadium. Now it's being call Mario Super Sluggers, which is an improvement in our eyes, and is to feature, as you'd expect, a plethora of characters from Nintendo's famous franchises. We're glad to see Mario is heading back to the diamond again!
The scans show off some interesting aspects of the game, including what looks like a kind of special catch system when playing in the outfield, which lets you rob players of home runs. Also, the player-specific abilities seem to be returning, as well as the themed stadiums in which you'll play ball. In the scan, you can see what appears to be Luigi throwing a kind of tornado pitch. Interesting, to say the least.
Pay attention, baseball fans: Activision has licensed the Little League World series into a new game, complete with way deformed representations of the athletes that participate in the sport. Sure, we may not dig on the look too much, but we do dig on the prospect of more baseball on our Wii. MLB Power Pros can't last us forever, you know!
The game is exclusive to Nintendo platforms and will feature 8 U.S. and 8 international teams. The title will also feature character customization options, although we're not sure if it's just cosmetic or something akin to actually building the stats of your players. We're hoping for the latter.
Little League World Series 2008 will be releasing on August 5th in North America. In the meanwhile, be sure to hit up our gallery below for some screens.
Heck, we can't think of a smarter way to market your product. With the Wii being the hottest item on the planet, this is sure to bring some folks in, with the hopes that they'll hit some homers and knock the price of their car down.
Of course, to take advantage of this offer, you first need to desire to drive around in a Nissan or Hyundai, since that's what kind of dealerships these are. And we're sure nobody ever paused to reflect on how great their life would be behind the wheel of an Accent. Unless you're a cafeteria worker at an elementary school or something.
We were a bit shocked to receive any kind of update at all about Disaster: Day of Crisis, much less a release date. Monolith's survival adventure is one of those games that disappears for months at a time, then pops up with just a few screens. For some reason, we think of it as perpetually on the brink of cancellation. But Nintendo's serious enough about releasing it to, uh, print a page in a retail pamphlet about it! Interesting factoid: Bears are now natural disasters.
Another page (after the break) tinily reveals new screens of Super Mario Stadium: Family Baseball, which was just announced for the U.S. as Super Mario Sluggers. From the title, we know that the new game will be developed by Namco Bandai and will share gameplay aspects (though certainly not controls!) with their Family Stadiumgames. Miis will also be playable!
The first news out of this year's Nintendo Media Summit is that the Namco Bandai-developed Mario sports game Super Mario Stadium: Family Baseball will see a U.S. release "sometime this year" under the title Mario Super Sluggers.
Nintendo of America's Bill Trinen demonstrated the game for press in attendance, showing unique fielding mechanics in which shaking the Wiimote signals the fielders to go, and a throwing motion sends the ball to the correct base. Pitching and batting seem to be pretty much what you'd expect!
According to IGN, the cast will include the usual suspects: Mario, Luigi, Peach, Daisy, the Wario Bros, Donkey Kong, Baby Mario, Toad, Toadette, Boo, and a Shyguy. More details about Sluggers should come out sometime next week.
Of this week's Virtual Console releases, there's really only one game I came out caring about. Which one is it? Well, you're just going to have to watch the video above, silly pants! Or, you know, head past the break for the other half of our VC Monday Madness coverage.
If you consider yourself a connoisseur of baseball video games, there's no reason why you shouldn't have a copy of MLB Power Pros! Never mind the deceptively simple art style with its super-deformed characters -- this is one of the deepest baseball titles currently available. Konami packed over a dozen different modes into MLB Power Pros, including an RPG-esque mode in which you follow a college baseball player's career to help him realize his Major League dreams.
Amazon has MLB Power Pros priced at $19.99 as part of an ongoing sale for sports-themed games today, so now is the time to pick it up if you're interested! Keep in mind that this deal will only last until midnight (or until stocks run out).
Update: It looks like this popular bargain is going in and out of stock. You might have to keep checking back until the $19.99 price shows up.
In a slightly surprising move (wait ... baseball games have music?), 2K partnered with Pitchfork Media to make the soundtrack for Major League Baseball 2K8(which comes to NA this week). By "make," of course, we mean "pick a bunch of different pre-existing songs," but that's neither here nor there.
If you ask us, the soundtrack for the game is looking pretty damn sweet. Then again, this blogger has a musical taste that is often disliked by the norm, so many of you may hate the track list. But, don't worry too much: supposing bands like LCD Soundsystem and Dinosaur Jr. don't do it for you, there's also a lot of good bands on the soundtrack that are more well-known, such as The Cure, The Cars, and Modest Mouse.
To feast your eyes on the full track list, make sure to check past the break.
MLB Power Pros might have been too cute for a tough guy (or girl) like you, or maybe you've simply been waiting for a more realistic baseball experience. If so, you'll have the chance pick up 2K's Major League Baseball 2K8 next week on March 4th.
The press release for the game reveals tons of waggle, which (as we've seen in Wii Sports Baseball) can be a lot of fun, if pulled off correctly. Aside from pitching and hitting, though, the game will also let you field with motion controls. You control the player's destination with the Nunchuck, but then use the Wiimote to throw the ball to the designated fielder.
The only think we're a bit skeptical about is the motion-controlled baserunning. To increase your speed, you shake the Wiimote and Nunchuck simultaneously, which might get annoying over time. Still, we suppose this is probably the most immersive baseball video game to date.
Alas, waggle comes at a price. The game doesn't support online play, and lacks the minor league and trading card features found in the other console versions.
Well, our video is later than usual, but with the big Shop Channel update hitting tonight, we kind of had our hands full. It's not often where we have to shoot and edit two videos in one evening. Still, we hate to disappoint, so check out our video wrap-up above and be sure to head past the break for our other coverage of this week's Virtual Console games.
Welcome to our weekly feature, Virtually Overlooked, wherein we talk about games that aren't on the Virtual Console yet, but should be. Call it aretro-speculative.
There aren't many sports games that we have enjoyed over the years. Not being fans of real sports, we have understandably little interest in simulating them in a video game (although that argument doesn't really track for all gametypes-- we enjoy Duck Hunt without caring to hunt real ducks, etc.)
Like everyone else, we enjoy Wii Sports, but before that we've generally shied away from team-sporting games-- except for Culture Brain's Super Baseball Simulator 1.000, which is so delightfully idiosyncratic that it got even our attention. Super Baseball Simulator 1.000 is the Super NES sequel to a very similar NES game called Baseball Simulator 1.000. Really, we'd love to play either on the Wii, but we have more personal memories of the SNES game, so that's the one we'll discuss in this column.
If you've played Mario's last attempt at baseball on the GameCube, then you might be thinking the same thing as that we are: Super Mario Stadium Baseball will be nothing more than a remake of the first game with Wiimote controls. We're optimist folk here, but the first title had some issues and we're afraid this newest game could make the same mistakes.
No news on who will be developing the game, whether it be an internal Nintendo studio or outsourced to someone else. Also, no screens were shown and no release date is known as of right now. Still, we're happy to hear that something a bit more fleshed out than Wii Sports: Baseball will be hitting the Wii.
For most, when they think of October, they think of Halloween and the leaves changing color. For all of us sports fans, though, October marks baseball playoffs. And, Konami, in their infinite wisdom, released a baseball game we're very interested in this week called MLB Power Pros.
So, will you be taking part in the festivities with us, or are you planning on playing through something else?
The Tanooki's review of MLB Power Prosincludes some lengthy video of the game in action, along with informative text about how gameplay works. We're fascinated by the series' continued Japanese success and impressed by the audacity of releasing an SD sports game in the realism-obsessed U.S. sports market.
The cutesy appearance belies some fairly deep gameplay. The review speaks of things like a batting "sweet spot" that shrinks and grows according to your performance, and pitching that gives the player control over not speed, but precise positioning.
The review makes some negative points about the difficulty of fielding and the nerfed motion controls, but is positive overall, and it sounds like the game can still be fun with waggle turned off. You can make your own observations from this video and the others found at the site!
Famitsu has put up the first screenshots we've seen for Major Dream, Takara Tomy's recently announced Wii game for the baseballanime, and ... They look exactly like how you'd expect a low-budget anime sports title to look like. What's up with the crotch pinstripes in the above image? His outfit resembles a wacky line graph more than it does a baseball uniform. Even with the game's Eyeshield 21 similarities, all the motion blur in the world couldn't distract us from that mess of stripes.
Courtesy of CoroCoro Comics, we've got some more to gawk at concerning the once-named Super Mario Stadium. Now it's being call Mario Super Sluggers, which is an improvement in our eyes, and is to feature, as you'd expect, a plethora of characters from Nintendo's famous franchises. We're glad to see Mario is heading back to the diamond again!
