Backyard Baseball '97 review: nails the bunt

Backyard Baseball '97 Review

Let's get the important stuff out of the way first. You have to choose Pablo. After all, he's a secret weapon, and honestly, he's a pretty good character. His legend has endured in the hearts of players for decades, never thinking they would see their little superstar again. Enter: Backyard Baseball '97, an incredibly faithful remake of the youth sports game.

The crack of the bat

Many players will return to Backyard Baseball for nostalgia reasons. I am definitely one of them. But for those who perhaps weren't born in the '80s, some explanation is due. Backyard Baseball was a simple and charming sports game. In truth, all sports games from the '90s would be simple for today's players, so I wouldn't call the original Backyard Baseball simplified. But it definitely has a childlike quality, by design.

In Backyard Baseball, you manage a minor league team. You choose a team color and a name like Little Rockets or Super Duper Monsters. You select a team of little kids who love to play ball and play a season of baseball. It is not a realistic interpretation of baseball; you can make throws do some pretty impossible things. But the batter's box, mastery of timing, is the same fundamental mechanic in any baseball game.

The theme is what makes Backyard Baseball endure. The children make a lovely group. Pablo Sánchez is, of course, everyone's favorite, but I like Kenny, a boy in a wheelchair who is a fantastic thrower. I also like these two little heavy metal gremlin brothers, and there are a pair of twins who are really fun on a team together. They all get little musical themes and unique animations. The entire game oozes personality.

pinch stroke

This remake seems totally faithful to me. I remember playing the original on a friend's dad's PC and then getting kicked out when I needed to work. But something about the game got under my skin. The characters and settings are surely memorable. Maybe I just couldn't get the cry of “we want a hitter, not a broken ladder” out of my head. It is repeated a lot.

And that is the biggest limitation of this remake. 90s games were smaller, literally. I was a little taken aback when I saw that the game was over 200GB. Then I blinked and realized no, this game is 200MB. That's bigger than a pair of MP3s, but smaller than a Blu-ray movie. And that means there's not much depth to be found. If anything has been added to the game since 1997, I haven't noticed it. What I did notice was hearing the announcers say the same lines a lot. That's already a problem in modern 2K games. Here it is significantly more egregious.

Runner on third

The same goes for animations. I love watching my heavy metal guy play guitar with his bat on the plate. But it doesn't alternate between a couple of animations; It's the same every time. This definitely pushes my modern patience to the limit. I loved watching the game, but at the end of a particularly fun and competitive season, I felt like I'd seen everything the game had to offer several times over.

By what criteria can we judge such a faithful new version? It's certainly dedicated to the original, right down to the windows that look like they came from an operating system from 1995. The whole aesthetic is even more powerful now than it was in 1997. Interestingly, it adds higher stakes to the game. Playing baseball on a dusty field with some friends is inherently nostalgic as an adult, even if you were born in 2010. It reminds you of some sepia-tinged good old days, where life was baseball and baseball was simple.

If you're looking for a sports game that will surprise you with depth and clever design, that's not what you'll find here. But if for some reason you're interested in what games were like before open worlds and crafting minigames, you won't find a better time capsule than Backyard Baseball '97. In a way, '97 is the most important part of the title. So get in your time machine, gather your team and do yourself a favor and make Pablo your cleanup hitter.