Funkmaster V Reviews

7800 Rank: Unranked Genre Rank: (Sports) Awards: None Looks Like a 7 Year Old Drew 'Baseball' Pros: Easily Shattered By a Sledgehammer Cons: You Might Own This Game It's Amazing How The 2600 Version of this Game Was so Bad... But Still Better Than This

Overview: Ahhhhhhhhhhh...the "American" pastime: BASEBALL. Even though Football, Basketball, wrestling, TV, video games, and the internet take up more of our time than baseball, some people still love this slow moving game.. Me? I'm an American Football nut myself, mainly because of my demographic. I was born in the city of the World Champion Colts, Baltimore, Maryland. Then I moved to the heart of American Football...Knoxville, Tennessee. As yes, Knoxville. What a town...you have the rusted Sunsphere, a brand new million dollar convention center that no one will go to, the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and the color orange. What? Why am I rambling? Well, that's easy...because there is not much to talk about when it comes to Realsports Baseball for the Atari 7800.

Graphics: This really looks like a cleaned up version of the 2600 game with the same name. Except you have bleachers to the left and right and a warning track. No wall mind you, just a warning track. All nine defensive players and the batter can be seen at once, so the field is cramped which makes it as hard as heck to get a hit on the computer. Just like many 7800 sports titles, we have the classic battle of the red team verses the blue team. The blue team comes from a friendly town called "Player 1". The red team comes from a futuristic city named "Computer." If a friend comes over to play, the red team becomes your cross town rivals, the team from "Player 2." The good thing about sport titles for the 7800 is you have to have an imagination to play these. I remember playing the 2600 version of this game and writing in a notebook divisions and city names. Then I would play the computer and the results would be charted. Gosh...I was a sorry kid. Gimmie a break, I lived in Knoxville. I think the Utah Saints won my Division's Championship. Either that or they opened up for U2 when I saw them...

Sound: Wow...sound is really bad in this game. The crack of the bat, the ball hitting a glove, the organ churning out a 3 second ditty when runners are in scoring positions are all fine. The terrible part about the audio is this sound that could be mistaken for crowd noise...if you were deaf. This swelling noise actually sounds like crazed bees that are coming to take your house away, or a very sick airplane that is struggling to stay airborne overhead. Whatever it is, it's loud, annoying, and never goes away.

Gameplay: Excuse me...I'm falling asleep...YAAAAAAAAWWWWWWWWN...Ok, that's better. One nice touch is that you have various pitches and swings at your disposal. There are eight pitches to choose from, including a fastball, two sliders, two knuckleballs, two curve balls, and a change up. On offense, you have various swings as well. All of this is well and good, but it doesn't matter. Because the fielders look like they are holding hands they are so close, there are only three places you can hit the ball to get on base. Other than that, the computer throws you out. The field is slow small and the base runners are so slow, it's hard to do much on offense. About all you can hope for is to either get a homerun, or have a man get on base and perform a "Hit and Run" on every swing. Offense is bad, but defense is worse. Even though you have a good selection of pitches, as soon as the ball is hit, there is no way to tell what player the computer will give you control over. Most of the time it chooses the wrong guy...which is very frustrating. Just wait until a line drive is hit up the middle, and you push the joystick right to have the guy you think the computer will highlight intercept the ball, but the game will give you control of the guy to the right of the ball. This will send the player running away from the ball like he is frightened of it. This will make you vomit. In a game based on strategy, there is very little baseball strategy here. You cannot steal, do a sacrifice fly, put in a left verse a righty, intentional walk, hit a batter with a bean ball...nothing. All players are generic, and there no stats to fill your stat hungry mind. This basically should have been labeled, "Realsports Softball".

Interpretation: Wow, Atari did a bang up job recreating a game originally made for the Atari 2600. The bad thing is...They forgot to improve it for it's "FLAGSHIP" console 5 years later. You know...I don't know if I'm crazy or not...but I think the 2600 game is better than this one. I really do.

Value: The computer is tough, and I have never played a game where it didn't have more hits than I did (even though it counts errors and fielder's choices as hits). What makes the computer tough is its defense. From the crack of the bat, it will be standing in place, waiting for your pop up to come down. If the computer hits a pop up on you, you might think it's a line drive hit to the warning track, only to see it curve down and stop somewhere near the infield. If programmers included the ball's shadow in the game, that would have been appreciated. Even though the computer gets a Gold Glove for it's defense, it gets a dunce cap for it's offense smarts. Its absolutely stupid, and you will crush it even though it will out hit you 2-1.

Overall: In my opinion, Realsports Baseball is in a three game race for the worst Atari 7800 game on the market. Just think about that for a moment. That is a huge statement! It's worse than Jinks, Crack'ed, Mat Mania Challenge and 90% of the Atari 2600 library of games. Why am I even reviewing this game? It wasn't worth my time! The programmers of this game are probably homeless now. They aimlessly roam the streets, telling people they used to program video games. People think they are lunatics...and I believe they are. May God have mercy on their souls.

Other Reviews:
The Videogame Critic: C+
Atari Times: 3 out of 10
CV's Panoramic Froo-Froo: 1.0 out of 5.0 (Atrocious)




Additional Info: I would like to take this time to thank Mitch Orman, owner of The Atari 7800 Page for allowing the use of his screenshots for this review.

This is the only Realsports title released for the 7800.