This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

Good news! We are going to have a short review this week, but not for the reasons that would normally constitute a short review. We are talking about Super Mega Baseball 3, yeah you know the follow up to SMB2 (I’m just not realizing the acronym is the same as Super Mario Bros). Super Mega Baseball 2 was that fun arcade-y baseball game that released a few years ago and was quick-looked by Dan and Vinny, remember when those two were together? Well I had the hankering to play baseball again, and the sequel was on sale so I figured why not.

Let’s start at the top shall we. Super Mega Baseball 3 (or SMB3 for the rest of this article) is a arcade style baseball game where you play as cartoonish characters and teams that contain no licensing from the MLB or any other baseball league in the world. You get teams like the Croc dons (a mafia crocodile) and players named stuff like “Dave Beefcake.” It’s baseball but faster (and better). Hitting and pitching involves moving a reticule and timing your release. Fielding is… you know, fielding. You can alternate by trying power swings or power pitches which require you to dial in your timing better or risk hitting a pop-up or throwing a wild pitch. Everything plays just like the 2^nd game, and outside of adding an age stat to the created players (more on that later) I didn’t actually notice any difference in the way you play the game minute to minute. You can still hit the ball back into the pitchers face, and that is still very satisfying.

If you are still refusing to read my original ranking of SMB2, fine, then this game offers you the ability to create full custom teams and players and define their look and stats based on how you see fit. A lot of customization options and while it is certainly not limitless, you can make lots of different teams all with unique logos, uniforms, and arenas. You can mix male and female players all on the same team, like before and truly craft your own dream-team. Hell, want to re-make the cast of Frasier as a baseball team, you can do it.. or if you have no creativity, re-make the Dodgers, both are acceptable. The two big changes that this customization had over the previous game are: you add ages to players and you can give them up to two bonus traits. The ages only matter when it comes to playing franchise mode, but the bonus traits are used in game. They can be positive or negative traits, + contact against left handed pitchers or – contact when behind in the count. Each character can only have two and they can add a little more variety to characters that have similar stats.

One of the biggest features that I appreciate is that if you have a SMB2 save file, you can import all the custom teams you made from that game into this game. That was so amazing it almost brought a tear to my eye, when I saw the option. See, I am a psycho and in SMB2 I probably made close to 20 different teams (team of family members, team of friends, Simpsons characters, super villains, etc.) and I certainly didn’t want to start from scratch and make all new teams. The process worked well, it names your teams something shitty like “Star_Wars_SMB2”, but you can clean that up so it doesn’t look like a command line on a computer. The other factor to consider if you bring teams and players over, is that in SMB2 you didn’t have to assign ages to your players or have the benefit of giving them bonus traits, so ages are populated randomly and no traits are assigned. You should do a once over and fix what you want to fix, because the traits might make your team slightly worse than the teams pre-made in this game and the ages could impact your team in the franchise mode.

Speaking of which, franchise mode is the MAIN attraction that this game has over its predecessor. Like in the previous game, you could play individual games, 1 game seasons, playoffs, etc. all with a custom league where you can set rules, teams participating, and so forth. With franchise mode there are some new wrinkles to the gameplay that you have to consider. For the main thing, franchise mode is trying to make a team have sustained success across multiple seasons. You can now sign and cut players, players retire at the end of the season, and there is a budget that you have to consider in terms of how much your team costs. It is adding some of that realism that people crave into a game that has virtually none of it. Throughout franchise mode, you will be given the chance to do player development which cost some of that bank (you get a small amount after each game) to improve a character’s stats on your team. These are usually done on a coin flip from being successful to highly successful, but some of the trainings will come with chances of gaining a negative trait or having a different stat decrease in addition to the other ones increasing. These player development trainings in the grand scheme of thing aren’t likely to change a player that much, because you are mainly talking about a stat changing 1-5 points on a 100 point scale, but it is always exciting when you win a coin flip and see something go up 10-15 points instead.

However, there is a frustrating aspect to franchise mode as well. Randomly during a season, a player will have an event happen to them that will adjust their stats as well permanently. You have no say in the matter and I couldn’t really gauge an understanding as to why or when this happens. You could have a player that is on a hot streak just randomly say they feel weaker and see their power and contact each go down 5 points. There are some random instances that cause stats to increase, but I found these much fewer and far between the stat decrease. It adds a randomness which I can appreciate, but these changes are permanent and not just like a 3 game decrease. So a character that you just spent big dollars to develop and increase their power by 7 could see a decrease a week later by 5 making your upgrade pretty pointless. Based on how much the computer was adding and dropping players, I got the feeling that the purpose of this is to constantly make you evaluate your team and see if you can get someone better to fill a role. I think I would feel better, if these changes correlated to their play on the field. Overuse of a player, or them slumping would see a decrease, while them performing well would see an increase. It just didn’t make sense that hitting .500 for three straight games, a player would all the sudden have trouble seeing the ball and lose some contact ability.

At the end of the season and playoffs (if you make it there) a random collection of players will retire. I say random, because while this is supposedly based on age, I think there is still a dice roll behind the scenes regardless of the age the player is. For instance I lost 4 players after my first year including a 25yr old who led the playoffs in RBIs and HRs. This isn’t a player who wants to change teams, but just one who is gone from the pool altogether. Maybe that player wanted to go out on top, or ride off into the sunset, but it makes me question if age is even relevant. You then have an offseason where you can pick up players to fill those spots you lose and start another season of the franchise. The franchise mode for this game is obviously not going to be as deep as you might expect from a simulation sports game, and while it can be fun to try and make a team successful in year two or three after losing your best players, it’s also frustrating that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why people are retiring.

Those are really the only changes to the game that I can think of. Franchise mode is going to be a mixed bag in terms of how much mileage you get out of it. For me personally, I hand-crafted dozens and dozens of teams and worked on balancing to make sure not one team was a super-team, to incorporate all those teams into franchise mode and then watch the CPU cut and re-sign generic players or half of all my created players retire at the end of the season isn’t what I really want. If I want to play as my created Simpsons team, I don’t want half the team to be non Simpson’s players, so for me I might mainly stick to just Season mode where I can still take a team to the championship and then switch to another team next time. If you didn’t play SMB2 or you did but didn’t make anything custom, the other big change (importing previous work) won’t impact you at all.

The game still has all the hallmarks that I loved from the previous iteration. It still has fun baseball gameplay where you can finish a game in 20-30 minutes. It has a very generous difficulty setting where you can individually set different difficulties for batting and pitching on a scale of 1-100, and it’s still really dumb (in a good way). It is technically better than SMB2, but I would only recommend upgrading to this game if you are really interested in that franchise mode, OR you don’t have SMB2 in any capacity. However, if you already have SMB2 or are looking to pick one up… depending on the price I might say that SMB2 will get you what you need just as well. For instance if SMB2 is $5.00 and SMB3 is $15.00, I don’t know if the upgrade is really $10 better, but if you love franchise mode, or want to play online, you probably will think its worth it. In terms of ranking, it’s never been easier for me… this game is basically the same with a slight improvement so it is one game up on the list.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: Its good, its technically better then the previous version, but it doesn't really do much else to really warrant a new version of the game. It sits right next to its predecessor. It is the 37th Greatest Video Game of All Time. It sits between #38 (SMB 2) and #36 (Theatrythm Final Fantasy Curtain Call)

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening