Hope everyone had a nice Christmas, and got as much loot as I did (electric blanket~!). Back to the countdown.

#6 Baseball Stars (NES - 1989)

What it’s about: Duh, it’s baseball. No MLB license, just a variety of wacky made-up teams. You can play as the Lovely Ladies or SNK Crushers, or make up your own team and boost their stats through winning. There’s also a season mode, where you can play up to five other teams in a 125 game season, plus there’s stat tracking in all the big categories.

Why it’s here: The mechanics. I’ve touched on this before, but Baseball Stars feels like baseball more than any other NES game. RBI baseball, while fondly remembered, had terrible fielding (I wish I had a nickel for every dribbler that turned into a triple). Bases Loaded has an enormous field, plus the hitting was very awkward. Baseball Stars basically stole the RBI control setup and improved the fielding, allowing you to dive or jump for line drives. The field is just the right size, too, so you can cover a lot of ground in the field but the ball can find gaps as well.

Building your own team is very addicting – with every win, you get a certain amount of money to boost stats. Boosted stats make your team better, which means more wins, which means more money, which means even bigger stats. It’s a vicious cycle.

The stat tracking was big - it was the first time any stats were tracked on the NES. It wasn’t perfect (you could see each player’s average and home runs, but RBI’s were only tracked for the top ten league leaders), but it was something.

The game also included the mercy rule, where if an inning ended with one team up by 10 or more runs, they automatically won. It made it easy to play a bunch of games in a short amount of time.

Downsides? No MLB license. That's about it.

Personal memories: Getting this for Christmas ’89 and spending the winter building the Hot Rods. When that team got erased, I built an even better team (the name escapes me, it was probably lame) that was ridiculously jacked. Through a 125 game season, no one hit below .600. My top player had 100 home runs and 200+ RBI’s.

Getting the ROM on my computer like two years ago and playing it regularly since. This is a game that came out over fifteen years ago, by the way. If someone could make a Baseball Stars ROM with modern day MLB players, I would crap my pants.

Next: Crime pays.