Retro spotlight: I Love Softball

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Softball rules. You ever watch the Women’s College World Series? Incredible sports television. Ever play in a slow-pitch league for adults on a beautiful Sunday afternoon? Incredible recreational sports experience. It’s a fantastic sport, one that can be played by young and old, by those with immense and frankly intimidating amounts of talent as well as those who haven’t picked up a bat or a ball in years and years. It’s more of a niche sport than baseball, however, at least comparatively, which also means softball has received a lot less attention in the video game space than its cousin.

Back in 1989, developer Marionette released I Love Softball for the Famicom, published by Coconuts Japan. It seemed an odd choice for the studio at first, given that they had worked on licensed titles for, I kid you not, a video game adaptation of the movie The Adventures of Milo and Otis, an MSX game released nearly simultaneously with and based on a straight-to-video Japanese film, Star Virgin, as well as various pachinko games. Marionette would end up expanding what they worked on around this time, however, and while they continued to create pachinko games for some time yet, they’d also eventually end up working on flight simulators, and a lot of them.

I Love Softball plays quite a bit like baseball games of the time, which should be no surprise given how similar the two sports are at their cores. You’re doing a lot of guesswork as to where your outfielders are when you try to chase down a fly ball, and action can sometimes feel a little sluggish, especially when going after a ball that’s already hit the ground. At least, it does let you press a direction on the D-Pad to correspond with the specific base you wanted to throw to, along with the A button, so that part is simple. I Love Softball does have that very arcade-y feel of pitching and hitting, which made for quite a few killer, fast-paced baseball games in the 80s and early 90s. Press A to throw a “normal” pitch, press A while also pressing down on the D-pad for a fastball, press up and A for one that’s going to have way more float to it, or left or right to curve the pitch a bit — be careful on those high ones, as you can throw it too high for it to be called a strike, even if it’s right down the middle. That’s unusual for this kind of game, which tends to focus on more side-to-side and a pure overhead approach to where the pitch is, but those high pitches make the strike zone a little more of a three-dimensional concept here, though, obviously, not in the way behind-the-back viewpoint baseball games would do in a few more years.

Hitting, meanwhile, is as simple as picking where in the box you want to stand, and timing your swing not just for contact, but also for whether you want to hit the ball opposite field, pull it, or try to go dead center. You’ll ground out or weakly fly out regularly until you get the timing, same as any game in this genre, but once you’ve got it feeling like second nature, the runs will pour in.

There are some quirks to get used to, though, that make I Love Softball a little more difficult to get into than some of its contemporaries on the baseball side. You have your choice of teams to pick from, all regionally based, and when you do, you also then have to select who is pitching. You can’t necessarily use their posted ERA as a gauge of whether they’re the best option or not, so sometimes you do have to wing it a bit. A problem that seems to be pop up with quite a few pitches is that they run out of gas real easy, and will need to be replaced. As games are seven innings instead of nine, you can empty out your entire bullpen with more haste than you normally would, but you can also still catch yourself giving up way too many runs quicker than you’d expected to due to your pitcher losing a couple of ticks on their fastball, or run out of pitchers and doom yourself end-game when the same thing occurs.

The game is punishing when your pitcher tires. It’s not just that you become more susceptible to an opposing batter crushing your offerings when they’re moving slower or with less bite, but it’s also that you might not even necessarily reach the plate! Accidentally walking a couple of batters before serving up a meatball that gets crushed is no way to win a softball game. It’s great when it starts happening to your opponents’ pitches and all, but try to avoid it yourself.

The lesson here is not to force the issue, and to switch your pitchers out when they begin to tire, but it can also happen real fast depending on who you’re picking. Some pitchers have much more stamina than others — I played some games where I got through four innings or so before the wheels began to visibly come off, with the pitcher starting to huff and puff and sweat and struggle to find the plate — and others feel like you accidentally began the game with a reliever. Again, more information would make all of this easier to sort through beforehand, but I Love Softball is not overflowing with that kind of data. So you have to work with what you know, which is the visible signs of struggle: sweating or breathing hard isn’t enough on their own, as you’ve got to wait until the velocity takes a troublesome dip, and pitches aren’t reaching the strike zone as needed. Only then should you remove your pitcher, because otherwise, you run the risk of being left stuck with an overly tired one at game’s end.

Which is fine! It’s just something to be aware of, this reminder that this is a game that released in 1989, and it’s setup very much to be something you and a friend can play against each other. The single-player mode is designed to be continual rather than a one-off, where fatigue for your starting pitcher from the first game actually carries over into the next game, but other than that design decision, it still feels like the main goal here was you and a pal going at it in exhibitions. You continue your single-player campaign here, by the way, through the use of a password. Just because battery backups were more common in Famicom cartridges by 1989 doesn’t mean they were always in use.

You’re going to have to play quite a bit to get a feel for the different pitchers and how to field when, again, your outfielders aren’t on screen until right before the moment a fly ball or liner is about to drop in. You get used to, say, the fact that the computer’s defensive programming leads them to quite a few mistakes you’ll want to take advantage of — circuitous paths to the ball, throws to the wrong base, that sort of thing. You figure out the right times to steal bases, to advance bases, when it makes sense to throw that fastball or lob in a high one, when it’s truly time to swap pitchers: it’ll all just take practice and patience to win a game here.

I Love Softball isn’t a must-play experience, necessarily, but it’s certainly got its quirks, given it’s softball instead of baseball, and was a Japan-only release. It did receive an English translation in the last few years, however, which translated the player and team names as well as the menus, so this obscure game became a little less obscure since. What its existence has mostly done, though, is remind me that there should be more softball video games out there. Sadly, a lot of sports video games these days are now from just a handful of developers, with licensing deals in place or there not being a game to speak of, but hey. Maybe a softball-esque Super Mega Baseball is out there, waiting to be dreamed up, and we’ll get to play it someday. Softball and baseball are different sports, after all, and the existence of the latter shouldn’t preclude the former being around, just like it doesn’t in real life.

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