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When the Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz wanted to show the sweet glory of a baseball pitch in flight, he would use a sort of shorthand. He'd draw two straight lines, scoring a horizontal channel across the panel, and within that channel a third wavy line gave you an impression of the stitching, moving up and down as the ball turned. If you enjoy spotting details like that, you'll love Super Mega Baseball, a game in which reading the stitching of an incoming ball is an entirely legitimate tactic. Is it spinning? If so, how fast? What kind of pitch am I dealing with? Where is it going to meet the bat?At times, it has felt like I've been leading Charlie Brown's loser team, too. Super Mega Baseball looks arcadey, with its goofy, plastic-skinned players perfectly invoking the kind of bobble-head sports caricatures you can pick up in memorabilia stores, or wherever charcoal briquets and antifreeze are heavily discounted. Its unlicensed line-ups are filled with names like The Sirloins and The Moonstars. And yet there's a beautiful core of serious simulation at the very centre of it all. In short: everything you do matters here, and, true to Peanuts' form, the game is swift to punish mistakes. Whether you're pitching or batting or trotting to first base, you need to be paying attention. As with the best baseball games, the infield can feel very small and elbowy, while paradoxically, a ball can take an age to get to the back fence - a truly agonising length of time, just right for your enemies to position themselves beneath its racing shadow. Super Mega Baseball captures the tactical horrors of baseball really beautifully, but it does more than that. This is a powerfully coherent baseball game, as well as being a witty, speedy, and surprisingly deep one.
And remember: baseball is a delight, but it can be tough for video games to truly capture that. With its entirely distinct roles - batting, pitching, fielding - the sport seems eager to fragment into mini-games. Watching real baseball makes you feel you're witnessing a factory in flow - with the bases loaded and the singles churning through, the whole thing is a bit like a machine for making runs. Super Mega Baseball nails this: it invokes the particular romance of each part of the game, but they also always feel like they're part of something bigger.
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