Gaming off the Beaten Path

Great, we're just starting out and already we have an enormous problem with false advertising. I just finished watching baseball almost four years after 2020 and what I saw was absolutely not what was promised in Super Baseball 2020. First and foremost, there were absolutely no robots or androids. You certainly didn't have to hit balls to dead center for home runs and there was a lot more foul territory. It was pretty much the same old baseball that I always remember, though I guess if I found out Aaron Judge is actually a terminator I wouldn't be surprised. Remember how futuristic 2020 felt in the 90's? As 2000 drew ever closer, sci-fi media started realizing they had to push their futures farther. You would have thought they would have just said 2100, it's very unlikely any of us are going to be around then. But a lot of games that would have had "2000" in the title started doing "2010" or "2020" as if it was so far in the future. I m...

  It's always fun to come across new things on the internet, even when those new things are actually old. In my never-ending  quest to get more eyes on Gaming Off the Beaten Path, I find myself interacting on social media far more often than I ever thought. I don't really do personal social media, so this is all very new to me. I've started following quite a few streamers, both old school and new, and stopping by the occasional stream when I get the chance. Usually, these are games I've heard of before, the new school stuff is Call of Duty, Fortnite, etc. while the old school  stuff is typically games like Super Mario World or things of that ilk (though right now it seems both the old and new are hooked on the Super Mario RPG remake). So I was intrigued when I saw streamer Juyceman Gaming playing an NES baseball title I've never heard of, a game called Bad News Baseball. Not that a guy with over a thousand followers needs a recommendation  from someone like me, but ...

It's time to continue our now-annual tradition of starting the year with an old sports game review. A few weeks ago, I talked about Cricket. Now it's time to talk about how we put bats on balls on this side of the pond. I can't, for the life of me, determine when this edition of Triple Play Baseball came from. A quick web search will show that it came out in 2001 and is the only game in EA's baseball sim series that doesn't have a year attached to it. You would think that you would just find the year that's missing, but the same search will also turn up information on Triple Play 2000, 2001 and 2002 and they all appear to be unique games. Maybe this is Triple Play 2001.5? I guess we shouldn't get that wrapped up in such things. I mean, does it really matter? Of course not. The quality of the game is what's important. And Triple Play Baseball has to be at least decent, right? I mean, EA was on fire at this point and with their quality control and attent...

 I think this might be the first time I've ever gone back to a series that wasn't a "big deal" video game IP. Sure I've had multiple posts about Mega Man and Final Fantasy games, but those series' are household names. They certainly aren't as obscure as a discontinued series of baseball games that ran through the late 90s and early aughts. I already covered All-Star Baseball 99 for the Nintendo 64, a game I gave a pretty good score. At the time, it was probably the best baseball sim you could find. It's certainly not anymore, but its still a good, fun game to break out from time to time. But if that game was so great, what happened to the franchise? Well, for one, the company that made it went out of business. Acclaim filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and it's intellectual properties were auctioned off, most of which were purchased by a company called Throwback Entertainment. Throwback then proceeded to do a big, fat nothing with the ASB series until 20...