Ninja Baseball BatMan | GamesYouLoved
I was asked the question ‘wanna play a bonkers but good game?’ A few days ago and who couldn’t say no; the title alone had me intrigued: Ninja Baseball BatMan. This ranks alongside Magical Hat’s Flying Turbo Adventure on the Megadrive as one of the best titled video games EVER!
Article by Darren Browne.
Follow him on Twitter here @KingMonkey25
Released in 1993 by Irem, the game has nothing at all to do with the Dark Knight, the game is baseball-themed and BatMan describes the 4 characters you get to choose from – men with bats and all of whom just happen to be ninjas.
The game is a 4-player beat-em-up and as with most beat-em-ups at the time, each character has their own strengths and weaknesses; Straw has a big reach (eg Donatello in the TMNT arcade game), Ryno has a quick double-weapon attack (Raphael), Roger has the most powerful strikes (think Haggar in Final Fight) and finally Jose is the kind of average of all the other characters (aka the Leonardo or Ax Battler of the group).
The story goes that someone has stolen some valuable baseball memorabilia and you have to fight your way through various American cities and defeat the end-level bosses to retrieve each item. The plot is pretty standard but then once the game starts standard gets a kick in the nuts and random weirdness takes it’s place; enemies include octopuses, squids and baseballs wearing sunglasses, evil baseball bats (who also have a bat to hit you with?!), baseball mitts, a giant man made of baseballs, fridges, fruit machines, aeroplanes, pumpkins on broomsticks and Prohibition-era gangster dogs with tommy-guns!
The game is bright and colourful and there’s never a dull moment, the big bosses are genius and inventive and I’m going to avoid describing further as I half the fun of playing is discovering what crazy thing was going to turn up next!
How this game never got released on a console baffles me, one of the most fun beat-em-ups I’ve ever played, right up there with TMNT & The Simpsons and it’s sad that so few people are even aware of it’s existence. To misquote Will Smith’s song Miami, ‘I only came for a few mins of playing but the game’s so good I wound up staying’.
Everyone needs to have played this game, this is why I love emulation, without it I would never have been able to experience this uniquely brilliant game and special thanks goes to @clammylizard for this recommendation!
Article by Darren Browne.
Follow him on Twitter here @KingMonkey25
