Found this somewhat recent article:
From the Bench: Where Are You, R.B. I. Baseball?
Posted February 24, 2010 by Robert Workman
Back when I owned an NES console, I had several games in which I could never part with. Battletoads was one of them (despite the ridiculously tough sewer bike level), High Speed and Pin-Bot come to mind (love the old-school pinball), and a few sports games were also highly played, including Tecmo Bowl and R.B.I. Baseball. Namco’s baseball game wasn’t big on frills, but it did exactly what it needed to, delivering on gameplay when it came to pitching, batting and fielding. It was also a good-looking game for a 1986 product, one of the better baseball games to hit the old console.
Then, as time went on, Tengen made the series more realistic as it moved on to the Sega Genesis console. After R.B.I. Baseball ’94, however, it vanished, succumbing to the “bigger boys” in the industry (in this case, Sega’s World Series Baseball series). We haven’t heard a peep from it since, perhaps indicating that it was gone forever in our gaming memories.
But then, last summer, something stumbled about. A playable R.B.I. Baseball demo game appeared briefly on Microsoft’s PartnerNet service, and a registered ESRB rating for the game came up from 2K Sports. Following that, the folks at Six Degree Games stated that the game was coming back, with the following description from an email reply…
“I'm a senior producer at Six Degrees Games and ultimately responsible for R.B.I. Baseball, currently being developed for Xbox LIVE.
We're not really responding to formal inquiries about the game at this time, but as R.B.I. Baseball fans, we relate to you in a big way. It's that same love for R.B.I. Baseball that made us sidetrack from the development of our virtual world (Action AllStars for young sports enthusiasts) in order to remake this awesome game for LIVE.
It's not a port, but the re-write is being done by people who were members of the old R.B.I. Baseball development team, and so a lot of the old nuances are being preserved. It's still easy, fast and fun baseball that doesn't require a complicated control scheme and it will feature the present day MLB teams and players."
We played it for a little while, and, surprisingly, it played just like the old NES game. We couldn’t wait for it to make its arrival on Xbox Live and take us into the rest of the baseball season.
But then it vanished. The game disappeared off of PartnerNet, 2K Sports didn’t say a thing about it, and, instead, we got the disappointing MLB Stickball. The game hasn’t been heard from since, and we’re starting to get a little concerned. Did 2K Sports decide to can the game entirely, or did it simply decide on delaying it until this season’s baseball run?
Personally, we’re hoping on the delay. Chances are that 2K really pushed the game back in favor of the lesser Stickball, to attract a more casual crowd into baseball games. (In our opinion, it simply didn’t work.) Besides, too many baseball titles would’ve probably overcome the market. Keep in mind that 2K wasn’t just pushing Stickball and Major League Baseball 2K9, but also the arcade-style The Bigs 2 (which we thoroughly enjoyed).
We emailed Six Degree Games to see what was up, but the company hasn’t replied yet, and there’s no mention of R.B.I. anywhere on the site (from what we could see). Hopefully, though, we’ll see the title make a return again.
I know some of you don’t think R.B.I. Baseball is a big deal, but think about it. If you can’t afford a $60 retail title like Major League Baseball 2K10, wouldn’t it be nice to rely on a cheap $10 purchase with enough base-rounding fun to satisfy you through most of the season? It never hurts to have an alternative that’s easy on the wallet, while still maintaining enough fun to make us appreciate video game baseball.
I implore 2K Sports to make the right decision here and bring back R.B.I. Baseball for this year. We know development’s come a long way on the game (even if nothing’s been said over the past few months), and the title would find a moderate success amongst both casual baseball players and hardcore fans who grew up with the NES game like I did. C’mon, guys, make the right call.
And for that matter, um, could someone poke Technos and have them give us a Super Spike V’Ball and/or Super Dodgeball revamp for Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network? We’d kill for those.
SOURCE
07-24-2009, 11:52 AM
