Quick Backyard Sports Retrospective Part 1

My first article will be on probably ones of my favorite franchises I played growing up when I had to resort to my computer for video games Backyard Sports.

Our story begins in the year 1997 when Humongous Entertainment already famous for there classic point and click kiddy games such as Putt-Putt, Pajama Sam, and Spy Fox Franchises decided to go into a different direction and make a baseball game with memorable characters like Pablo Sanchez the little chubby Mexican that only speaks Spanish but is also perfect at every sport that there honestly theories on the internet how he's on steriods. Not to mention the fact the player character themes were really awesome. We even have one character who is in a wheel chair.

Creative stadiums like Steel Stadium the "backyard" of Ernie Steel with an easy home run like angle. There's also power ups, you get many good plays you get power ups like the aluminum bat or torch your opponents with the fire ball pitch although I can hardly imagine how many injuries or deaths these power ups would cause in real life like the screaming line drive that literally knocks down players who try to catch the ball. While other sports are usually incredibly complex with there system controls and gameplay, backyard sports was incredibly straight forward. You throw the ball, you catch it, you hit the ball you run It's incredibly straight forward and fun. Finally there's the color commentary by Sunny Dey and Vinny Gooch while they're amusing at first, especially Sunny Dey who just says everything so seriously while Vinnie The Gooch kind of pretends he's all that when he seems more like a real jerk like he goes out of his was to say mean junk while it eventually gets very tiring listening to the same limited dialogue over and over again, fortunetly though you can skip it or mute it. There's even a multiplayer for the games in case you don't mind sharing your keyboard or mousepad.

However like all games it still has it's issues, the AI is incredibly stupid even in it's hardest setting you can easily get ahead with by 30 runs. Not only that but it get annoying how the players on the field get so easily distracted, or have trouble catching the ball, yep they can just drop even if they're in the perfect position or fall flat on there face just by taking one step, seriously it's like all the players are a bunch of drunk Chevy Chases. Not only that but the controls can feel really outs of place at times like you click in one place and you can go off the fields. Worst part about these original games though is that you can't pick all the players you want for a pick up game sometimes because they just didn't appear on the screen and the level of how good a player is, is very low so there's little difference in performances, fortunetly however those were fixed in the later games. However the game play was still very addictive for being so straight forward and the memorable cast of diverse characters really get you hooked with there clever dialogue and personalities. The wasn't a total success in its first year but a new game was released a couple months later anyways called Backyard Soccer.

The game is basically like Backyard Baseball but soccer same memorable characters, bad AI, addictive game play and even the same stadiums Backyard Baseball had but as a soccer field. We also have a different Play By Play Person replacing Vinnie The Gooch, Early Gray who basically has no personality outside of being British and being annoying by making the same comment over and over like Vinnie. However if there is one awesome thing this game has that's different is the season play which is pretty self explanatory you beat as many teams as possible to win The Astonishingly Shiny Cup of all the Cup's Cup. If you don't mind the bad AI it's a great way to kill time plus it's the only classic game of the franchise to be available Atari website so check out if you need a time killer game.

More to come on this soon.