How
many things could possibly go wrong with a baseball game? It's a pretty
simple sport. You throw a ball, hit a ball, and catch a ball. Nothing here
should be too difficult to program... or so you would think. RBI
Baseball '95 is easily the worst sports game for the ill-fated 32X (not
that there were many, but still). Every conceivable issue that
baseball games have suffered from in the past rear their ugly head here.
The lack of actual teams could be overlooked thanks to the MLBPA license,
but when the game plays this bad, who cares?
The menu screens provide a decent amount of options, from an 80 or 162 game season, playoff, World Series, home run derby, and stats that date all the way back to 1986. Unfortunately, there's gameplay attached to all of this.
First and foremost, the gaudy graphics do nothing for this game. Every batter not only looks exactly alike, but their stance is always the same. This is digitized graphics at their absolute worst. The pitchers look like they've been ripped from a Saturday morning cartoon (remember those?) and don't mesh AT ALL with the batter graphics. There's some decent animation, but it surely doesn't make up for the rest of this games graphics.
Things don't get any better with the sound either. The annoying music deserves to be turned off. Even the organ sounds screwed up. The minimal play-by-play has been lifted directly from Sports Talk Baseball, a game released nearly 10 years before this one. To make matters worse, the announcer even screws up calls. Listen in awe as he claims the ball is heading back to the pitcher only to fly out to left center. Priceless.
The A.I. is either dumber than a brick or an absolute genius. It all depends on how it's feeling that day. It can blast balls out of the park with ease at times, other times it will swing and miss every pitch. The fielders do a decent job, but they'll constantly throw to the wrong base on pickoff attempts. The entire package is downright funny to watch.
This is a far cry from this series' heyday back in the days of the NES. Technology has not been kind. Had they kept the arcade style gameplay the series is most famous for, there might be something here. It's obviously not the case however, and this is one of the many 32X games to avoid at any and all costs.
