Major League Baseball struck out swinging.
Developed by Atlus and published by LJN for the NES, this game is based on an American baseball league of the same name, and contains all of the official teams in the league, although all player's names were omitted and stats were slightly modified, (which caused an entire lawsuit because of that). It was released in 1988 exclusively for the North American region.
In 1989, Clark Thiemann was excited to play his brand new NES game, LJN's Major League Baseball. But when he started playing, his favorite MLB superstars weren't in the game. So then he sued Nintendo (as mentioned above), LJN, and Major League Baseball.
The menus are confusing: selecting your batters isn't clear at all. You have to select four infielders, three outfielders, a catcher and a pitcher. Using the DH means another batter can be selected. The game doesn't even tell you that you're limited to those positions. So if you try selecting another position player, "DO NOT SELECT" appears, which may confuse players. It also lacks different modes, such as a season mode or a playoff mode.
There are many bugs and glitches. For example, there's no delay between pitches, so after a ball or strike is called, the pitcher can immediately pitch again. The game also often struggles when there's more than one runner on the screen because of the game's slowdown.
The controls sometimes suffers from input delay. It's noticeable when trying to advance a runner, when trying to swing the bat as a batter, or when it's the player's turn to field.
The physics are poor. Fielding is a nightmare because of the way the ball drops after a pop-up or a fly ball.
The collision detection is horrendous. Sometimes the fielder has the ball go through him when trying to catch the ball for an out. Unlike baseball rules, it isn't called an error.
The camera is terrible: If a ball hits the outfield wall, it can be difficult to throw out runners because of the way the game pans the camera.
The implementation of MLB rules is inaccurate. Compared to RBI Baseball, which at least implements baseball rules more properly, it's jarring to see a few inaccuracies in MLB rules.
The AI is very inconsistent and undeveloped. When it's the player's turn to bat, it is very easy to score runs on the computer because it tends to take the longest route to field the ball. However, when it's the player's turn to pitch, it will hit almost every pitch that you throw. This happened to the Angry Video Game Nerd when he played Major League Baseball.
For the All-Star Game mode, you have to go through multiple menus to choose All-Star players from all of the other teams from that league by pressing Start. This is very confusing due to the aforementioned menu problems.
The controls seem also confusing: Base running is difficult because sometimes the runner can be called out because the game gets stuck sometimes when the player instructs the runner to advance. The pitching controls are no better.
The graphics are lackluster for its time. Other than the nice-looking title screen, a lot of the teams have similar colors to another. An example would be the Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Cardinals sharing the same colors on both home and away.
Some teams don't correspond to their actual uniform colors, such as the California Angels being dark purple. This can be blamed on NES limitations.
If you like MLB, don't even play this.