ALL YOUR BASEBALL ARE BELONG TO US

by Matt Minucci

I'm not sure why a Samoan is strangling a hockey player. But I like his hair.

My brother, God bless him, plays Dungeons & Dragons. He’s not mentally handicapped. He’s not 25 years younger than me. He simply enjoys being utterly dorky. Now, I’ve given him no end of torment over this kid’s game he still insists upon playing, but it has led to some interesting exchanges.

I was playing MLB The Show 2009 on my Playstation 3 and this game is one of the absolute best sports video games I’ve ever played. One element of the game is that you can create a player and ‘play’ him as a minor leaguer and try to make it to the Majors. Once you do, you can continue to play your chosen guy throughout his long and lustrous major league career. It’s unbelievably addicting.

Nothing says Hall of Fame like the legendary Gil Cutliff.

So, there I was, playing through my second season in the bigs, fresh off a rookie of the year campaign and ready to assume the mantle of “ace” of the 2013 New York Yankees (I toiled in the minors for a couple of years. Sue me.).

My brother walks in, and after having watched me play for a while, he commented: “Hey, it’s like D&D but for sports nerds.” I was appalled. I was aghast. I was really pissed off. I said, “Excuse me, but this is baseball, it’s absolutely nothing like the Harry Potter wannabe Medieval Times goofiness you and your cheeto eating, Mountain Dew drinking weird friends do every Friday night.

My brother cuts loose on a wild Friday night.

He thought about this and said, “Well, you beat the other team right?”  “Damn right,” I said. I was proud of my 6-0 win, with 10 K’s over 8 innings. So, after beating the bad guys…” “Opposing team.” “Right, whatever, after beating the bad guys, what, uh..what were you doing with your guy.” I sensed approaching dread, but I played along. “Well, I got a bunch of achievement points for winning, and I was..uh..distributing those points to…uh…make my pitches and stamina better…so I could…uh do better in future games.”  A triumphant gleam in my bro’s eyes, as he said, “So, when my fighter beats a band of orcs and goes up a level and distributes his development points into his weapons and skills to make himself a better fighter, how is that different from when you beat the Red Sox and distributed your ‘achievement’ points to give yourself a better fastball and better curveball to make yourself a better pitcher. And hell, we both need better stamina.”

I was in big trouble, so I did what I always do in situations like this. I yelled for my wife.

“Katie! Tell Danny that MLB The Show isn’t anything like Dungeons & stupid Dragons!” My wife picked up my child, looked at me with utter disgust and simply said, “Your both complete dorks.”

Once again my wife is the voice of reason.

There you have it. At the end of the day, we’re all dorks in some fashion. So in that spirit, and in the spirit of a great video game – MLB The Show 2009 – I give you the SIX WORST sports video games of all time:

6. Extreme Sports With The Berenstain Bears.

Well. That is extreme.

It’s tough to envision what the exact market for this game would be. I find it hard to believe there’s a huge devoted following of Berenstain Bears fans out there that are clamoring for more BB video games.

But even so, this game is an absolute walking abomination. First of all, there’s only four ‘sports’ to choose from: sledding, biking, kayaking and skateboarding, and if you’ve noticed something from the four sports listed, congratulations, you’ll never have to worry about buying this turgid piece of sewage. If not, let me explain, nimrod. A sled, a red sled that’s a vaguely bike-ish looking thing, a sled that’s yellow and called a kayak and a sled that’s black and called a skateboard are all very easy to develop. You just have to keep changing the colors and call it a different name. And if you thought of simply changing the color of the screen from white to blue to let the player know they’d gone from sledding to kayaking, hey now, I’d have to ask you if you programmed the damn thing!

Now imagine it in white and presto! you're sledding. 

You can play as Brother or Sister Bear, or play through it twice, one time as each. But if you actually did play it twice, then I’d have to ask you to check you over-sized head and tiny body into a psych ward, mongoloid.

5. Michael Jordan: Chaos In The Windy City (1994 – Super Nintendo)

Words fail me.

Uh. Michael Jordan has balls. A lot of balls. He’s got normal balls. Fire balls. Ice balls. He has Homing Balls, Grenade Balls and uh…Iron Balls. And I’ve not made any of this up. Ok, so maybe I’m fudging a little as this isn’t a ‘sports’ game. But, c’mon! You’re Michael Jordan and you have to run around throwing magic basketballs at giant clay Trolls in order to save Phil Jackson and Scotty Pippin. Still not makin’ it up.

This must be the version where you play through as Clyde Drexler.

Also there are various points in the game where you have to shoot one of your balls through a strategically placed hoop to get a power up. So, there’s sort of a sad and demented basketball aspect to the game.

But I just can’t get behind any game where you find hordes of minions, defeat the boss at the end of the level, collect all the keys and make all the tough shots, and are rewarded not with a princess but with Horace Grant.

Not the Princess I was looking for.

Also, the end game boss is a giant cross-dressing Dennis Rodman who turns into a blond haired lizard that shoots anal pine cones at you. Ok, I might have made that part up.

Or did I?

4. Shaq Fu (1994 – Sega Gensis, Super NES, Gameboy)

Uhm. What?

Well, if I’m going to include Chaos In The Windy City, I pretty much have to include Shaq Fu don’t I?   What can I say about Shaq Fu? It’s generally regarded as one of the worst video games of all time. Basically, you’re Shaquille O’Neal and you wander into a Kung Fu dojo Japan to play in a charity basketball game. While in the dojo you are sucked into another dimension and must rescue a young boy named Nezu from the evil mummy Sett-Ra.

Curse you, Shaq Fu!

I’m almost positive that was also the plot of the Thundercats.

Quoting one of the reviews for this game, “Everything about this game reeks of poo. Smelly smelly poo.”

There’s also a website devoted entirely to collecting every single copy of this game and then destroying them. (http://www.shaqfu.com/main.php )  Now that’s bad.

3. 10 Yard Fight ( 1985 – NES)

It's either a football game or a gang rape. Or both.

Ok, admittedly, it’s difficult to slam a game that’s 27 years old, but I’ll make an exception for 10 Yard Fight. This game is one of the first attempts to bring a football video game to a gaming console – the original Nintendo – and it fails miserably in this attempt.

You have no plays to call on offense. You simply hike the ball and then decide whether to run, throw a short pass or throw a long pass.  But since the defenders can leap forty feet in the air to pick off your long passes before they’ve gone halfway across the screen, that option is not recommended.

Pictured: Me after playing 10 Yard Fight.

What is recommended is that instead of making your eyes bleed by playing this abomination, you simply lay your head down on something heavy and unyielding, and then have your friend hit you several times in the head with a baseball bat. Or a sledgehammer. That’s the best way to simulate the experience of playing 10 Yard Fight.

2. Tommy Lasorda Baseball (1989 – Sega Genesis)

Did you fight Gihgamerzilla in the '78 Series Tommy? 

Now, many of you are probably just skimming through this, barely giving pause at Tommy Lasorda Baseball, and reading ahead to see why it’s such an atrocious game. But I have got to tell you, it’s not a bad game. For 1989, the graphics are revolutionary, and make full use of all the capabilities of the Sega Genesis system. The game play is excellent. There’s a wide selection of pitches available. The graphics are fantastic for their time – when you hit a homerun, if you hit it far enough, you can see cars in the parking lot. It was one of the best baseball console games that could be found, at the time.

Not pictured: The giant laser beast waiting for you in the parking lot.

So why is it on this list. Well, I’m here to tell you that I have intimate, personal experience with Tommy Lasorda Baseball. You see, you had an option of playing a single game, a thirty game season or a full 160 game season. One flaw of the game, however, was that in order to save your progress you were given a password that was slightly less complicated than say, hacking into NORAD.  It was a long stream of letters, numbers and other gibberish that gave you eyestrain trying to make out on your 13 inch TV screen what it actually consisted of. And if you wrote it down wrong? You’re screwed. Start over.

Final quest in Tommy Lasorda baseball.

So, I spent the entire winter of 1989-1990 playing Tommy Lasorda Baseball, having to restart over a half dozen times, until finally, I made it all the way through, with a record of 159-3 (including 151 straight wins to finish the season), to the World Series.

Now we come to the crux of the matter. So, here I am, in the World Series, with a record of 159-3, vs. some team – I think it was St. Louis – who had a rather pedestrian mark of 95-67. Suddenly, my team is the 1962 Mets. I can’t hit. I can’t field. Every pitch I throw is roped off the wall or hit 700 miles out of the part by a second baseman that hit .220 with 2 HR in the regular season. The World Series wasn’t a matchup of team vs team, no, it was the End Game Boss. That’s right. I wasn’t playing the St. Louis team. In reality, I was facing off against Dr. Galva-Metri-Tron Hitler and his Ion Cannon.

End game boss in Tommy Lasorda baseball.

And thank you for making me remember such a painful childhood memory. I will now light myself on fire.

1. Slam City with Scottie Pippen (1995 – Sega CD 32X)

I can't even tell what's going on here.

Oh dear. Where to begin? First of all, this is a full motion video basketball game. Which means it’s not pixilated graphics. It’s actually basketball players – including Scottie Pippen – on the screen, playing hoops vs. your virtual player – in one-on-one goofiness. I believe it’s the only one of it’s kind in existence. So, cliché as it sounds, when they made this game, they broke the mold. On purpose. Out of desperation.

It’s tough in words to describe the total awesomeness of how bad this game is. But I will  try. First of all, Scottie Pippen sings the opening title song, so, uh, right off the bat you know this is a special game.

See for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhqZAy1X6fU

“Watchoo wanna get? Respect. Watchyoo gotta earn? Respect!”  You can now thank me for getting that stuck in your head all day. All process servers please report directly to Alex Stemkovsky.

My editor.

To get to the legend, Scottie P himself, you gotta earn respect dude. Mad respect. In game terms, this means you have to beat four street thugs named: Finger, Mad Dog, Smash and Juice.

In addition to having to switch between 4 different CDs during gameplay, it has some of the most aggravatingly hysterical dialogue ever in a video game. For example, say you just lost to Fingers in a hard fought 7-1 slugfest (one point being the most I’ve ever scored). Mad Dog tells you in no uncertain terms that you suck, while there’s a cut scene of Juice knocking you to the floor because you had the gall to actually lose a game of street ball to Fingers. Then, there’s a second cut scene of Fingers ripping a weed out of the ground and handing it to your girlfriend who then looks at him with adoring, F-me, bedroom eyes.

Do you mind if I dance wif yo' date?

So yes, you lose the game AND your imaginary girlfriend. Talk about lack of mad respect. But I suppose the game developers were on to something. They had to figure that 90% of the people that played the Sega CD actually had imaginary girlfriends, so why not have a game that takes them away?

Other quick but notable insults from Slam City: "He polished you like China", "You fell like an angel out of the sky", "Boy I'm going to drink you like milk", "I'll stuff it so far down your throat you'll look pregnant with twins", and "there's a pen and paper in my jock strap, start taking notes". 

Excuse me while I go to Bangkok and hire David Carradine’s favorite hooker. 

Too soon?