Ninja Baseball Bat Man

Irem Corporation

1993

This is the kind of game the I Hate This Game is all about. Yes, you did not misread the title and I am sober. Ninja, Baseball, Bat, Man. This is an arcade game so I am not real worried about too many of you out there actually buying it, But when I saw it I knew I had to share.

So, how did I run into this? Well I have my friend Nurbs to thank for that. (Shout out to the Nurbs boy!) He is a bit of an old school game nut. He showed it to me one night; however I mentally blocked it out until now and realized it was perfect review martial.

I actually would like to know how they came up with the idea for this game. Why Ninjas and Baseball? WHY?!?!?! I picture this scene in my head; the designers are all sitting around trying to come up with a new game idea late at night and are having no luck. Suddenly the Janitor comes in, not the friendly immigrant janitor, no the crazy, scary janitor! You have all seen him. Matted hair, facial tick, and constantly muttering under his breath. So the designers asked him for ideas and he says a string of unrelated words, takes the garbage and leaves. The designers then work with his first phrase for a while, then decide “Rancid Electric Puppies” will not make a good game, and focus on his last phrase, “Ninja Baseball Bat Man.”

The plot of this game, what little of it there is, is that someone has stolen your team’s golden baseball equipment, and your “commissioner” sends you on a mission to get it back. After that you are off through 6 America-cliché ridden levels. How cliché ridden? You fight machine-gun touting gangster dogs in Chicago, giant killer poker cards with flame-throwers in Las Vegas, and a haunted mansion in Texas, because we all know how haunted Texas is.

But the bad guys don’t stop there. Besides doing battle with all sorts of evil baseball related baddies (balls, gloves, umpires, etc) you also fight giant squids, airplanes, kittens, cars, furniture, swords, and a lot more things that I don’t want to (or can’t) explain. As if you had enough to cope with, the baddies are not thrown at you in any sane or logical order. So you go from punk Baseball, to evil planter monster, to spiked cat-carrying cart, to something you can’t identify until your mind snaps, and you stop fighting and accept the madness. There is even a cheerleader squad that drops down and blasts enemies or gives power ups. They also test your sanity. They are summoned with a big pink heart with pink written on it. When you grab it they jump down sing a high-pitched and unintelligible song, then jump back up. Just long enough form you to go ‘WTF was that’!

Under the bizarre pretense, NBBBM is a pretty standard side-scrolling fighter. You have four characters to choose from, each with their own set of special moves and bat-based weapons. There is the balanced one (who is of course the “leader”). The weak but fast, effeminate one (or just all out female, I can’t tell). The slow but strong one (who is always bigger than the rest). And finally the tall but…um, long one (?).

After you retrieve the six gold items you discover that your commissioner that sent you on the mission was the one who stole the items in the first place!

Now please join me in an Anime-style stagger.

The commissioner then jumps into his evil madmen outfit and runs off to his flying “stadium fortress”. That is the actual phrase they use in the game. After a fairly short battle (as least on arcade final-boss-battle terms) with his ‘King Babe’ robot, your now former commissioner begs for forgiveness. You of course do not give it to him and hit him onto the moon, where he learns his lesson, er something…

This next portion of the interview has been brought to you by the letters W, T and F.

What liked: This game is IHTG gold.

What disliked: Ninja Baseball Bat Men?! WTF!

What to expect: A fighter game on LSD.

What not to expect: Sanity

What's so different from this and other games of it's genre: You're running around just getting used to the idea of killing evil frog-tongue baseball mitt creatures then all of a sudden SUPER DEFORMED SQUIDS WEARING DIVING MASKS!!!

Ratings on:

Control: 5 – Four directions, jump, and hit. Plenty of combos for button-mashing fun.

Graphics: 7 – Despite everything else this game is made pretty well, with a good amount of time spent on the sprites.

Sound: 3 - You have no idea how many ‘ah yea!’ ’s I had to endure to make this review.

Style: 7- This game has a lot of style, unfortunately it is the WTF! kind not the OMG! kind.

10 minutes: WTF, ninjas and baseball?!

20 minutes: WTF, They made levels out of nothing but American stereotypes?

30 minutes: WTF, Did the Commissioner really need to change into the stupid getup, and a Giant Robotic Babe Ruth?

#1 reason why I hate this game: Did there really NEED to be a special move where you actually hump an evil baseball! Like my sanity didn’t have enough strain from this game!

-By Bantor “Let’s go to Texas!!” -actual game quote used for level transition.