Super Baseball

Name:	Super Baseball
Company:	Atari
Model #:	CX-26152
Programmers:	Joseph Tung (RealSports Baseball) Bob Ashworth (ICC) (Super Baseball)
Year:	1988
Released?	Yes
Notes:	Super Baseball is an update to RealSports Baseball

Atari was always the master of repackaging, and Super Baseball is a prime example.  If Super Baseball looks familiar it should, Super Baseball is nothing more than a cleaned up version of RealSports Baseball.  Why Atari decided to recycle a baseball game from 1982 and release it in 1988 is unknown, but the results were unimpressive.  What Atari really needed was a completely new game, but then again Atari Corp. always was known for doing everything on the cheap.

Although they may look nearly identical, Super Baseball has actually been slightly enhanced over RS Baseball.  There's a snazzy title screen and a menu for selecting some of the options (although the difficulty switches are still used to control the player speed).  The players are now mono-colored, but their animation is much smother and they look a bit more human (although not much).  The blocky playfield looks exactly the same, except the dirt is now a darker color and the score boxes are black instead of brown.  The biggest difference though is that The computer AI has been overhauled.  Unfortunately this new overhauled AI introduced several new bugs that were not present in the original RS Baseball.  

If the difficulty switch is set so the computer has fast players the human player will almost never be able to get on base (forget about home runs!).  It's impossible to successfully bunt against the computer opponent, and the computer pitcher never throws balls (everything is a strike).  It's not all bad news though, several bugs in the gameplay were also fixed such as accidentally throwing the ball over the head of the fielders (an annoying bug from RS Baseball) and the ability to win a game by simply stealing bases over and over again. 

It's understandable that Atari wanted a fresh new baseball game for the late 2600 market, but it's a complete head scratcher as to why they decided to do the bare minimum to such an old game rather than design a new one from scratch.  Atari (and ICC) decided to program a completely new Basketball game called Double Dunk (originally Super Basketball) instead of upgrading the unreleased RealSports Basketball, so why cheap out on Super Baseball?  Needless to say Super Baseball didn't set the world on fire, but at this point few people were buying a cheap 2600 for its sports games anyway.

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