4/5 ★ – Bengerman10's review of Backyard Baseball.
Backyard Baseball is shockingly good decades after its release. I have formative memories of Backyard Baseball - I'm not sure when or how, but somehow around the year 2000 my family wound up with a mildly scratched up copy of the game. It wasn't the first video game I ever played, but it probably was pretty close. And at the time, I was too young to understand what made this game fun - I just understood that it was fun.
Backyard Baseball does something I wish more games would do: it has an easy to understand exterior - it takes a well known game (baseball), packages it as a few dozen kids playing in a league together, each with their own distinct styles and personalities. On that same surface, each player has a set of four ratings from 1-4: pitching, fielding, running, and hitting. That's all you ever really need to know, and that is why it worked for a young Ben still in the single digits age wise.
So why does it work for me 25 years after still playing it? Backyard Baseball has a whole additional layer, and then another one after that, if you go looking for it. Behind each player are cute little backstories, individualized music and walk-up themes, and hidden stats. Lots of hidden stats, actually. For instance, Kenny Kawaguchi (nicknamed K-Man) is an excellent pitcher.
But what makes him an excellent pitcher is that he has incredible stamina and the best pitch in the entire game: his slowball. The game doesn't explicitly say this, it's something you pick up over time by playing with Kenny. That isn't unique to Kenny's character either - every character has some kind of variation on what makes them a good, bad, or unique player.
Though, it's the final layer of Backyard Baseball that makes it the most interesting to me. The game drops various hints, whether while playing the game and its commentary or on the readable player baseball cards, about unique abilities that many of the characters have. For example, one character is extremely lacking in the stat department unless you pair her with her twin sister. Another plays better if your team's logo is the color pink. It's stuff like this that makes Backyard Baseball so fun to slowly unpack.
My more significant issues are with the port more than anything else. I spent a lot of time playing on my Steam Deck, but the issues persisted elsewhere. The first was an odd audio popping sound that I can *almost* remember existing in the original version of the game - but at the very least, they did not fix it here and it does happen a few times per game.
More significantly, Backyard Baseball, once you've figured it out, doesn't really have all that high of a skill ceiling (which is fair, it's a game made not for a 30 year old). I applied a bunch of house rules, such as having inning caps on my pitchers, turning off a visual tips or tools to help with hitting, and more. In my first league, I drafted a team of what seemed like the best players, and it wasn't until the playoffs where I was really having good back and forth with the CPU. In the future, I'll play with a wider variety of players, so perhaps that will help.
I would have loved to see the game re-imagined just a little bit rather than such a straightforward port, but hopefully that's what the next Backyard Baseball will accomplish. This iteration holds up amazingly well for its age and concept, and I'm very glad I got back into it.