Genki developed this game for Imagineer; Genki is best known for their line of Doom style games such as Kileak the Blood and the recent Beltlogger 9. Baseball is a national pastime in Japan, much like it is here in the USA. When baseball season begins in the spring, we can expect 5-6 baseball simulations to be released in Japan and the USA on all popular console platforms. Think of it as part of the season. Chou Kuukan is a little late to catch the excitement of a world series but it helps to round out a sparse Nintendo 64 library. There are twelve pro teams in Japan and all of them are included in Chou Kuukan with their full team rosters intact. Each player has been programmed with his personal game data such as batting style, batting history and batting average. Batting history takes into account how the player has hit in the past such as the percentage of fastballs that he has parked into the bleachers and how many times he has struck out against left handers. All this data is taken into account when you play the game. This data load sounds well and good but the first N64 baseball game comes off in rather low-key fashion.
The pictures are reminescent of Powerful Pro Baseball from Konami [Available on the Super Famicom and Playstation] and the graphics are considerably rougher than what we have come to expect from the N64. Suffice to say, the player characters do not inspire or amaze with their stubby, super deformed bodies and blank stares. The animation however is smooth but this is not be something that was unexpected, especially for a 64-bit game. How does the game play? In fairly unspectacular fashion. The batting perspective puts you behind the batter and your task is to line up a crosshair with the pitch and then swing when the crosshair and ball meet. This adds a sense of timing and accuracy to the game but these were seen in Powerful Pro before. If you match the crosshair and the pitch up, you can hit the ball into the outfield but in many cases, I lined fouls and easy outs into the infield. Herein lies the flaw in the batting mechanism. To get a hit, you will have to be nigh perfect in your timing and the execution of your swings.
One redeeming feature found in Chou Kuukan is that all of the action is rendered in true 3-D space without the flick screen sequences of other baseball games. For example, when a ball is hit, the camera stays on it and you get to watch the action and the ball at all times. I have not seen this anywhere else and it is a very nice perspective to have in baseball. Replays for great plays and not so great plays alike are shown in a variety of closeup and far off angles which give the game some much needed visual dynamics. Genki injects some humor into the game with players that turn into statues when they make an error and some fine catches can be made when normal, tiny deformed bodies become super elastic to make a long diving catch. Chou Kuukan falls short of being a fine tuned baseball game but fans of the national pastime will find it a welcome addition [grudgingly] to their library with its quirky characters and high learning factor.
In the beginning, Nintendo's credo was that it was quality and not quantity that mattered. They would seek to limit the amount of titles on the N64 in favor of releases that warranted public scrutiny and enjoyment. Looks like that has fallen by the wayside, much like the credo fell when the Super NES became increasingly popular and licensees lined up to produce mediocre product for yesteryear's premiere gaming console. Thus begins an new era of N64 software where not everything that is released is a must buy. Of course, the release of Cruisin' USA proved that a couple of week ago.

Return to the current NCS stock table.