Baseball game for the DS?

July 24, 2007 7:40 AM

Baseball game suggestions for the Gameboy DS, Advance or the PS2?

Lately, I've been playing RBI Baseball 3 far too often on my computer. So, I'm looking to get a baseball game that will play on either my DS or PS2 (I'd prefer it to work on my DS).

I'm looking for the following features
-It doesn't have to have MLB teams, but if it does, it needs to have all of them.
-I'm looking for more RBI Baseball style hitting (or at least a level that allows RBI style hitting), so I don't have to perfectly aim my bat, so much as hit a button at the right time
-A season mode
-The ability to make trades would be great
-The more stats, the better, especially if they update with each game

One thing that would be awesome, but I'm not getting my hopes up, would be if you could edit players... ie. Create your own team like you can with the RBI Baseball ROM editor. Classic baseball teams would be cool too.

posted by drezdn to computers & internet (9 comments total)

If your DS runs homebrew, you could run RBI Baseball by emulating the NES (?) hardware. This is probably a bit of a pain but would be cool and of course generalizable to other classic games. This seems like a reasonable starting point.
posted by grobstein at 7:56 AM on July 24, 2007

I don't know of any good DS baseball games. There are DS baseball games however.

I agree with grobstein. By a R4DS or M3 + PassKey (~$30-40?) and download nesDS and a RBI Baseball 3 ROM (I guess you already have that if you're playing on your computer.) NesDS is pretty good, allows for savestates and my favorite feature is the L button to rewind the game, if you didn't like the pitch :)
posted by neustile at 8:24 AM on July 24, 2007

Might want to check out Baseball Advance, if you haven't already. The hitting mechanism isn't exactly as you describe, but seems reasonably close.

It's pretty slim pickings when it comes to baseball games on the DS, apparently.
posted by aparrish at 10:45 AM on July 24, 2007

If you go the homebrew route, Baseball Stars is awesome. Old NES game. Very similar to RBI.
posted by zackola at 12:13 PM on July 24, 2007

PS. Baseball Stars does pretty much everything you describe.
posted by zackola at 12:14 PM on July 24, 2007

Whatever you do, SKIP "MLB 2K7". It has the license, but all the teams are generic (i.e. no logos or stadiums, just the approximately-colored uniforms); there's no season mode and rosters are not permitted to change. To say nothing of the dreadfully slow gameplay and unresponsive controls.

To my knowledge, it's the only DS baseball game (not counting the universally-panned "Wiffle Ball") except for the GBA offerings.

I've heard good things about Baseball Advance (mentioned above) especially if you like the old World Series Baseball games. However, I'd drop $20 or more on a real port of RBI Baseball for the DS, not doing homebrew myself.
posted by gazole at 1:09 PM on July 24, 2007

I hope this won't be considered a derail, but everytime I hear about these homebrew DS kits I get very excited, and then forget about them. The big question is: do they work with a Mac?
posted by synecdoche at 1:25 PM on July 24, 2007

synecdoche: depends on your use. If you want to use strictly homebrew (which includes NES emulators) all the cards will be fine. If you want to play GBA and DS "backups" (i.e. ROM files) it depends on the card. The M3 has a windows only program that writes DS ROMs to the card (you can of course use Parallels or Boot camp if you have an intel mac.) The R4DS claims that you don't need external software, so it should just be drag and drop, but I can't confirm that.
posted by neustile at 7:29 PM on July 24, 2007

Baseball Advance has been the closest I've come to what I was looking for, though it does lack some of the features I want.

Some day I'll be brave enough to try using one of the emulators for the DS.
posted by drezdn at 11:32 AM on August 28, 2007