Jayson Young: If you were a parent trying to pick a Super Nintendo title for your baseball-playing son during the system's opening months in North America, your options were Super Bases Loaded, Super Baseball Simulator 1.000, and Nolan Ryan's Baseball. Between those three, the obvious choice was the one with a future Hall of Famer winding up on the cover, of course!

But as it turned out, Nolan Ryan's Baseball was a bad RBI Baseball clone with fake teams, fake players (except for its cover athlete) and a fatigue system that made its season mode unplayable as pitchers wouldn't recover stamina as the schedule progressed. Once you ran out of fresh arms, your entire pitching staff would be stuck tossing meatballs over home plate for the remainder of the year. The fielder movement and throwing animations were also unusually slow -- so slow, in fact, that you could easily exploit the AI's baserunning defense and turn every outfield hit into an inside-the-park home run.

Still, I kept playing the single-game exhibition mode, trying out all the different teams and players against the computer on weeknights then competing against my schoolmates on weekends.

Two years was (thankfully) all it'd take until Ken Griffey Jr. Presents Major League Baseball would arrive in the United States and make every other Super Nintendo baseball game immediately irrelevant.


Caley Roark: I'll go very old-school here and highlight Tiger's handheld Electronic Baseball. See, growing up, the only video game options I had were playing at my friends' houses or whatever worked on our Apple IIGS.

So when I unwrapped Electronic Baseball in the late '80s, I was pretty excited. The box boasted "3 skill levels" and "Realistic Batting," so I couldn't wait to slice through the impossibly hard plastic packaging and break this one out.

A few double-A batteries later and I was in business, except this version of baseball forgot most of the actual baseball's rules. If I recall, you had three outs to record as many runs as possible. There was no pitching, fielding, lineups or any of the other nuances of baseball. In fact, there were only two gigantic buttons: swing and run.

It certainly didn't rival the games my friends had, including some of the titles Jayson mentioned. I'm not sure what my 10-year-old self was expecting from a handheld LCD game.

All of that said, I sunk hours into that game.


Millennium:Growing up and acquiring every system you could was a right of passage within my group of friends. Unfortunately that also means you get to play some terrible games in the process. For me, that included the Christmas of '94 and one of my favorite basketball players ever disgracing my Sega CD 32X.

Upon opening Slam City with Scottie Pippen I was filled with excitement. A basketball game with real video and actual people? I'm all in. That excitement quickly turned to frustration as I played. The game was almost impossible to succeed in, and this was highlighted by the figurative Spalding tattoo I constantly received on my forehead from the same 3-4 quick clips of a basketball being swatted into orbit quickly followed by trash talk even Matt Hasselbeck would turn away from.

There are still nights I wake up in a cold sweat hearing "The fingers got you again!"

Chase Becotte: I'm cheating a bit and going with a game that simply featured a basketball star. That's right Shaq Fu, I still remember you.

I believe the year was 1994 and all my 7-year-old brain wanted for Christmas was the fighting game with that funny and awesome basketball player in it. The Magic were the coolest team at the time, and so obviously Shaq Fu had to be good -- after all that's just good science science according to a 7-year-old kid. But yeah, Shaq Fu was bad. Real bad. Totes bad.

And the thing about getting something like that on Christmas is you just deny that the game is bad because it's all you got. That's your major gift. I went through all seven stages of grief probably in about the span of five hours, but definitely was stuck in that denial stage for about the first four hours and 55 minutes of the ordeal. Shaq Fu broke my fragile brain when it came to games. It was the first major present I had received in my life that had just been total garbage.

Santa screwed me, or maybe Santa wanted me to realize how good I had it when I had been getting things like Mega Man X and Super Mario Kart. Lesson learned Santa, lesson learned.

At the very least, I have to believe Barkley, Shut Up And Jam: Gaiden was at least in part inspired by the bizarre crossover that was Shaq Fu. And for that, I have to be thankful.

 

 

 

What about you? Which sports game for you was your White Elephant? Share your story in the comments!