MLBPA Baseball

MLBPA Baseball, or Fighting Baseball (ファイティングベースボール) as it is known in Japan, was a sports game for the SNES, Mega Drive/Genesis, and Game Gear in 1994 and 1995. It was one of the first console games to feature Major League Baseball player names and statistics. Its American version was published by EA Sports. The game included the 1993 season's major league players and stats thanks to its MLBPA license, but could not use team names for lack of an MLB license. The game got around this by using the city names of each team with matching colors, and using terms "A League", "N League", and "The Series". Players are allowed to play a single game (with the default teams being Philadelphia at Toronto, the 1993 league champs), a full season based on the 1994 schedule (with wins and losses recorded by password in the SNES version, battery back-up for Genesis), playoffs, and a World Series. The game was released on an 8-megabit cartridge.

Couched in what the packaging billed as "huge arcade style graphics," games could be played on either natural or artificial grass (depending on the home team) during day or night. The game also featured scoreboard animations for double and triple plays, home runs, grand slams, pitching changes, pinch hitters, and sometimes strike outs. There were also several cheat codes to alter the game play. These included "RBBR," which made the ball bounce extraordinarily high, and "BRRR," which kept the ball from bouncing at all. Under ZSNES, the game tends to freeze at random spots in the game (a similar effect occurs in the NHL series and the Madden series). The audience sound is muffled by limitations of the 16-bit sound engine of the Super Famicom.

See also: other 1994 baseball games

 * Super Bases Loaded 2 and Super Bases Loaded 3 - published by Jaleco
 * Ken Griffey, Jr. Presents Major League Baseball - published by Nintendo
 * World Series Baseball Starring Deion Sanders - published by Sega
 * Tecmo Super Baseball - published by Tecmo
 * RBI '94 - published by Tengen.