Backyard Baseball ’97 Review – Nails the Bunt

Backyard Baseball ‘97 Review

Let’s get the big thing out of the way first. You gotta pick Pablo. He is a secret weapon after all and in all honesty, he’s a pretty great character. His legend has lived on in the hearts of gamers for decades, never thinking they would see their short superstar again. Enter: Backyard Baseball ‘97, an incredibly faithful remake of the junior sports game.

The Crack of the Bat

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

In Backyard Baseball, you manage a little league team. You pick a team color and a name like the Little Rockets or the Super Duper Monsters. You draft a team of little kids who love to play ball, and you play a season of baseball. It’s not a realistic rendition of baseball; you can make pitches do some pretty impossible things. But the batter’s box, mastering the timing, that’s the same fundamental mechanics in any baseball game.

The theme is what makes Backyard Baseball endure. The kids make up for a delightful ensemble. Pablo Sanchez is of course everyone’s favorite but I like Kenny, a kid in a wheelchair who is a fantastic pitcher. I also like these two little heavy metal gremlin brothers, and there’s a set of twins who are hilarious on a team together. Everyone gets little theme songs and unique animations. The whole game overflows with personality.

Pinch Hitting

This remake feels entirely faithful to me. I remember playing the original on a friend’s dad’s PC, and then getting kicked off when he needed to work. But something about the game got under my skin. The characters and the fields are memorable for sure. Maybe I just couldn’t get the cry of “we want a batter, not a broken ladder,” out of my head. It does repeat a lot.

And that is the major limitation of this remake. 90S games were smaller- literally. I was a little bit baffled when I saw the game was over 200 GB. Then I blinked and realized no, this game is 200 MB. That’s bigger than a couple of MP3s, but smaller than one movie on Blu-ray. And that means there’s not a whole lot of depth to be found. If anything has been added to the game since 1997, I did not notice 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

Same goes for animations. I love watching my heavy metal kid air-guitar with his bat to the plate. But it doesn’t cycle between a couple of animations; it is the same every time. This definitely take my modern-day patience to the limit. I was delighted to see the game, but at the end of a particularly fun and competitive season, I felt like I had seen everything the game had to offer a few times over.

By what standard to judge such a faithful remake? It is certainly is devoted to the original, down to windows that look like they came from a 1995 OS. All of the aesthetic is even more powerful now than it was in 1997. It weirdly adds higher stakes to the game. Playing baseball in a dusty lot with some pals is inherently nostalgic as an adult, even if you were born in 2010. It hearkens back to some sepia-tinged old days, where life was baseball and baseball was simple.

If you are looking for a sports game to surprise you with depth and clever game design, that’s not what you’ll find here. But if you for whatever reason are interested in what games were like before open worlds and crafting minigames, you will find no time capsule better than Backyard Baseball ‘97. In a way, the ‘97 is the most important part of the title. So hop in your time machine, assemble your team and do yourself a favor and make Pablo your cleanup hitter.

***PC code provided by the publisher for review***