If I ran a baseball team, I would simply have them score 13 runs every game and have dominating starting pitching, I don't know why other teams seem to be having a problem with this theory so far this year.
It's been two games and the boys are undefeated in spring training, so we can clearly extrapolate out that the O's are going to win all 162 this year and Adley will hit 150 bombs. And when they lose tomorrow's game now that I've said this, the line will be that ST games don't matter and I'm just glad to see them back on the field after 5 months off.
But seriously, god I missed baseball.
So I picked up the new Konami baseball game (Super Baseball Pros or whatever it's called) A) because I'm always down to try a new baseball game and B) it was 99 cents, so I literally didn't even have to pay for it, thanks eShop credit.
Now, I'm a big arcade baseball kind of guy; things like The Show get too fiddly and sim-y for my tastes, and for my money the best ones are the Super Mega Baseball games for being easy to pick up and still giving you enough fine control over things to make a difference. So when I say the game does or doesn't do something well, odds are I mean "in comparison to how SMB does it," because that's the series I'm most familiar with. And I know that Konami's series is pretty long-running as well, so odds are this isn't exactly full of new observations, but as far as I know they're all JP only.
The first thing that hit me when I started playing was that it was kind of overwhelming? The first thing it does is ask what kind of team you want (focus on pitching, fielding, hitting, etc) and builds you a starter team based on that response. And this is cool, but god forbid you actually go look at your team because the team view is a mess of colored names that are poorly explained (if at all) and every single character has unique stats, and if you want to swap them out for one of the ~70 initially available characters you can, but you're gonna have to go through and check all of their stats and honestly after about 30 seconds of fiddling with it I was like nope, I cannot be bothered with this. I'm sure it's useful (or even necessary) if you want to actually go for the online leagues but it's a lot to ask of someone, especially early on. You'll have to dive in on some level though, because the COM matches are all pulled from teams that you've generated so unless you want to play a mirror match against your own team, you need to have another squad available to give the AI. This could have easily been avoided by having some pre-built teams with silly names and a quick description of their strengths, with the option to dive in further if you really want to.
Once I actually got into a game, it plays well enough? Like, it's baseball, and it's hard to screw that up too badly. The pitching and fielding is more or less identical, but I think I like Konami's batting system better than SMB on account of having a power swing system that doesn't suck ass (SMB uses a system where you tilt the right stick down and then up at the right time to swing, SBP makes it so that your hitting reticule shrinks down to only be the sweet spot of the bat). There's still a little bit of information overload as skills and special abilities pop in and activate seemingly whenever they want to but overall once you actually play a lot of this stuff can just be tuned out.
The complaints I do have are largely mechanical, the biggest one just being that the game moves really fast. The computer will hit a ball up the middle and it'll just rocket through as the game attempts to decide whether I'm controlling the pitcher, 2B, or SS before it gives up and sends me to the CF because the ball is gently rolling in the outfield. And on the flip side, I really miss the ability to to control individual baserunners. Your options when batting are "advance everyone", "send everyone back", and "tag up for a sac fly at 3rd" with nothing in between. I must have ran into an out three times in my first game because I wanted to go first and third after I hit a long single with a man on first, but you just... can't. Either everyone goes or no one goes, and it's a really weird omission even for a game with arcade gameplay.
Other than those couple nitpicks though, it's hard to go wrong when the game runs you a buck, especially since Super Mega Baseball 3 is like, $40 (although it does go on sale a lot). Given how cheap it is, I would totally recommend giving it a try if you have even a passing interest in baseball or baseball games.