Ninja Baseball Bat Man / Yakyuu Kakutou League-Man - Arcades (1993) By Jeff “Kamatacci” Browning The early 90s was a great time for America’s favorite pastime: The arcades were the best they had been in years. The majority of the arcade games that came out during this time either ripped off Capcom’s fighter Street Fighter II or ripped off Capcom’s beat-em up Final Fight. While it didn’t take long for the fighting market to get oversaturated, the beat-em up market fared a bit better with plenty of new and fresh games. We had beat-em ups that took place in the future, in medieval times, and in prehistoric times. We had games based in the wild West and feudal Japan. Even licensed games were very good , with the X-Men, the Simpsons, and the Turtles all receiving great offerings. We kept getting different ideas, and the boys at Irem wanted to continue that tradition in a big way. That’s when they made Ninja Baseball Bat Man (Yakyuu Kakutou League-Man, literally Fighting Baseball League Man, in Japanese). In NBBBM, you play as one of four robotic ninja baseball players. Different enough for you? Let’s meet the team. Captain Jose (Captain Red in Japan): He’s the leader with the all-around average stats. Twinbats Ryno (Green): He’s the small guy, but boy is this sucker fast. Not only is he the quickest runner and swinger, but he may be faster than any beat-em up character ever. He holds two very short bats, but he can get like six or seven swings in a second. Beanball Roger (Yellow): He’s huge, and it’s not the steroids. He is always thinking about food. Very powerful, but that’s offset by being the slowest character. Still, he is faster than the majority of characters from most other games. Stick Straw (Blue): The veteran of the team. Tall and skinny with insane reach. His bat takes up nearly half of the screen. He also has the largest variety of throws. The game opens up with a mysterious person stealing the golden statue of Babe Ruth. The commissioner of the Ninja Baseball League has summoned you to find it along with any other memorabilia before someone makes a huge profit on eBay. As you go from town to town to state to state, you are confronted by hundreds of types of living baseball gear. The most common enemies are anamorphic baseballs, but they come in all kinds of shapes. Well actually, they are all spheres, but they do come in all different breeds, from cyberpunk to robotic spiders to zombies. You’ll also find very evil bats and gloves, along with killer catching gear, lunatic lawnmowers, and even some non- ball stuff like octopi, jack-o-lanterns, clouds of smog, playing cards, and my favorite, the mob dogs. All the sprites are drawn very colorfully, probably even more so than the Simpsons arcade. And there is never a loss of things going on in the background. I’m sure some people will be turned off by the overly cartoony graphics, but they hold up pretty good even today. This may sound like all fun and games, which it should be, but there is really a deep fighting system underneath it all. There are only two buttons, attack and jump, but there are tons of special moves and combos. Each character has six, seven, maybe even more unique special moves, including throws, stand- up attacks, rushing moves, and even a crude form of desperation moves. Pressing both buttons together lets your character find his stance and swing for the fences, at the cost of a little bit of life. When your life is in the red, you gain access to a few more moves that you can pull off in rapid succession. Since these are ninjas we are talking about, they all know some ninjitsu and elemental magic. They can get small doses of it regularly, but jumping and pressing back, forward, attack lets out a huge explosion. nailing everyone on screen for the low cost of half your life bar. Each guy has a different power: Jose has EARTH (!), Roger has FIRE (oh I like where this is going), Ryno has LIGHTNING (nuts), and Straw has WATER (so close too). However, even with all the magic, I feel the best move is a good old baseball slide. Just get running and hit attack, and you’ll slide into your opponent, hitting them several times. Each character has a bat, so there are no other weapons, but there are a few things to throw. Regular baseballs and bases do quite a bit of damage, but not as much as the black bases, which act like an unlimited supply of shuriken. There is also TNT, which should be self-explanatory, as well as statues of Tanukis and a few different Maneki Nekos (that Japanese cat waving his paw). Then there are the cheerleaders who are summoned with a heart icon (wait, HEART? Why couldn’t Ryno be WIND!). They dance around with a fancy light show and either hurt all the enemies or summon lots of food. I can’t recall seeing many cheerleaders at baseball games, but then, I don’t recall any ninjas either. One of the girls will also appear to tell you when to move on in the level. Speaking of food, there are all kinds of it, which restores health. There’s a bunch of food you expect to see at a baseball game, like burgers, fries, hotdogs and drinks. But then there’s also a lot of ethnic Japanese food like rice, sushi, and live eel. Funny thing is, I believe the last thing restores the most health of all. While everything mentioned so far is great, NBBBM really gets its charm by all the little details. There are too many to capture them all. Every character has unique animations for getting burnt, electrocuted, frozen, or stabbed. Nearly all of the enemies have different parts you can knock off, and the bosses have entire limbs they can lose. Enemies die different ways. When they get knocked out, little baseballs dance around their head. All kinds of things pop out of the background. When the mob dogs get knocked down, they roll over and shake off before getting up. There are just all kinds of cool animations and extra details. You have to play it for yourself, but do pay very close attention because you‘ll probably miss most of them otherwise. The music isn’t that memorable, but it is very funky. There are all kinds of “Oh Yeahs” and stuff like that, so if you love Toe Jam & Earl and the like, you’ll love this. But I would much rather have some of the other Irem offerings on my soundtrack. There’s also plenty of quick samples from a typical baseball organ. Let’s look at the levels and bosses. You start in Seattle, and the boss is an evil small prop plane. The weirdest part is that you fight him inside a bigger plane. Oh yeah, right before a boss appears, the floor opens up and a few balls pop out and play the trumpets. Very cool touch. Next, you head to (San Fran)Cisco. Most of the level is on top of a broken Golden Gate Bridge. This is also the first of a few cars you can drive for a short time and destroy everything you see. After a mini boss who is a giant made entirely out of baseballs, you fight Mad Lax, a evil car who spits out little cars. Then there is the first of two mini games in which you must squeeze a ball via rapid button pressing. If you lose, which you will on a keyboard, the ball taunts you with the Japanese equivalent of the middle finger. On to Las Vegas. I forget, which team is located in Vegas? Anyway, tons of glitz and glamour. The enemies here stray away from the baseball theme and are mainly based on cards, and very nasty ones at that. How many cards carry flamethrowers in real life? The boss is a slot machine who will pull his lever every once in awhile, causing something weird to fall on you. Now, Let’s Go to Texas! Japan must not care for Texans too much as everywhere else so far has been a city, and now we go to an entire state. Everything here is haunted, so prepare to fight poltergeist, zombie balls, evil hamburgers, and a devil that messes with your movement. The boss is a bunch of junk with a buffalo head that walks like a chicken. Next, on to Florida, another broad location, but we are in a noticeable location, the Everglades. The big thing here is a factory that that turns Tanuki and Maneki statues into enemy balls. It’s a pretty small level that concludes with a mechanical gator boss. Going back to those nice little details, beating the gator turns him into a mechanical purse. After another minigame, you move on to Chicago and fight the mob dogs. Like Vegas, there’s almost no baseball here (kinda like the Chicago Cubs) and it’s just you against the dogs. The boss is a bit disappointing, just a bigger dog with ribbons in its hair and a shotgun, but it reveals that the mob dogs are the real reason why Prohibition was such a disaster On to the final level, but not before the real secret is revealed. The bad guy before it all is… the Commissioner. So while most of the stuff in this game is fake, one thing is much like real life: the commissioner is evil. Anyway, it says the last level is New York, but it looks like the last level is the Turtles in Time arcade cabinet. Seriously, you are on a catwalk high above the illuminated city just like that game. Atleast it looks much much nicer here. And, this has something Turtles doesn’t have, a floating baseball stadium. Jump in it and onto the field to fight another ball giant, another and much harder plane, and the final boss. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles may have Super Shredder, but Ninja Baseball Bat Man has Super Babe Ruth. Yep, put all the memorabilia together, and you get The King Babe. He looks more like a mutated football player, but he has a monster of a bat that shoots out tornados. When you beat him, the commissioner, who was riding on his back, pleads his case, but Jose quickly bats him to the moon. And the moon isn’t too happy to see him. With all the quirky Japanese madness going on here, of course it was released over there. However, it is pretty much the same as the American version. In fact, besides the few story scenes, the game is still all in English. The fighters were all given boring names based on their colors. And the title screen has a closeup of Jose/Red. But that is pretty much it. It does seem like the game is easier, but that is probably just me. Sadly, this game never went anywhere after the arcades. And seeing how those are as alive as baseball without cheating and that Irem isn’t known for putting out collections, you may never see this game outside of emulation. Speaking of Irem, while they would much rather make shoot-em ups over beat-em ups, this isn’t completely out of their league. Just a year before this came out, they turned the live action Peter Pan film “Hook” into a surprisingly good brawler. They also put out the great post-apocalyptic Undercover Cop that year, too. And of course they were responsible for the classic Kung Fu Master in 1984 and a few other early and mediocre beat-em ups. Still, they will most certainly always been known as the R-Type guys.