Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball (3DS)

Nintendo’s often been a little slow to adopt the latest trends in gaming, and while that can sometimes lead to them lagging behind in areas like online play, it also leads to interesting little experiments like Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball. For their first game to feature real money microtransactions to expand a game’s content, the purchases aren’t actually set prices. Instead, the player gets to haggle with the game to try and drive the price as low as it can go, a game that looks like it costs 40 dollars to buy all of the content actually able to hit as low as 16 if you play your cards right.

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball is free to start, but if you aim to spend no money on it you’ll get very little content. The game has a wide array of baseball themed sports minigames, but the player will only be given small demos that introduce the specific ideas that content pack is built around. Once you’re interested in buying more content though, the haggling aspect of the game takes center stage, not only because you’re going to start knocking the price off a new batch of minigames, but because an incredible amount of attention was given to making this aspect feel more colorful and interesting on its own. Rusty is a humanoid dog who was once a pro baseball player and has retired to run a sports shop, but when the sales were too slow, he started to invest in video games instead. Buying up a few cartridges from a strange Nintendo imitator called “Nontendo” for their 4DS system that lets you literally hop into a game, Rusty sells the cartridges to the player for 4 dollars each, and considering 9 of the 10 contain 50 minigame variations within, this actually wouldn’t be too bad of a deal. However, Rusty is all too willing to let the player haggle down the price, and while the absolute lowest it can go varies from game to game, you can reliably slash the prices in half at least.

Even without a guide to help you talk Rusty down to a lower price it’s not too hard to get the absolute lowest, partially because the game is quite generous in how it’s laid out. Your first weapon for saving yourself some pocket change is simply picking the right dialogue choices while speaking with Rusty, trying to figure out which path will keep him happy and generous so he’ll dole out discounts. The player will gradually get to know more about Rusty’s attitude and be able to pick these more easily over time, but similarly they do get a bit harder the deeper in you go as you start needing to play hardball even when Rusty is trying to earn sympathy from you. Rusty is an over the top character in many regards, with high highs and low lows as buttering him up gets him ecstatic but the wrong word can quickly get him teary-eyed. In fact, Rusty often likes to remind the player of his rough home life, the retired athlete now raising 10 children on his own after his wife disappeared, Rusty even asking you to pick one of the interchangeable tots to take care of to take the load off of him. That pup of your choice actually assists you in the bargaining process though, giving tips and insight to help you drop the price and notifying you when it won’t get any lower.

Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball actually has an unfolding story that takes place between haggling sessions, Rusty’s life going through new swerves that both seem to help and hurt him. Considering how much you’ll be listening to him to try and drive the prices down, these developments add an interesting and amusing new layer to the process and one that again can be exploited to your benefit. Beating the minigames will start to fill out stamp cards that give you prizes for hitting certain milestones. One of the most common ones would be donuts, Rusty needing one to open the negotiations each time but the donuts are abundant enough you should never really need to worry about having one on hand. Luckily, even making a flub in the haggling will just freeze the discount at the current amount and you’ll get to try again, the generosity removing some of the tension in trying to work down the price but hard to argue with since you’re saving real money due to it. Discount tickets can also be earned in small amounts from the stamp card or the 3DS’s StreetPass feature, but there are a set amount and doing the math properly is key since there are some games that can’t be haggled for and the coupons are the only way to mark down the price. The special items play a bigger role though, things like a nose hair trimmer and bouquet of flowers having an unclear purpose until one of Rusty’s musings or stories give you a good in to give it to him as a gift to earn some more preferential treatment. The game has made the haggling process an interesting and rather easy idea to engage with, even outright getting concerned if you try to purchase a game for full price, but the intervention of Rusty’s old mentor Pappy Von Poodle also ensures the story can continue if you decide to ignore the haggling process entirely.

While the charming play-focused approach to applying discounts to downloadable content is a nifty aspect of the game, the minigames themselves are well conceived and come in a variety of forms. While all of them have some connection to the sport of baseball, none of them actually have you playing a true game of the sport. Similarly though, the minigames don’t just take the easy route and make all of their action focused on something like batting or pitching only. On top of those two concepts, there are minigames based around fielding, working as an umpire, taking care of your gear, and even messing around like trying to balance a baseball on your bat. Out of the ten purchasable collections there is one dud though, the concept behind Bat Master being that you are able to carve and customize your own personal baseball bat for use in games that utilize one. Besides very little options for its appearance, the impact of a custom bat is quite minimal since most bat games focus on things like rhythmic or well-timed swings where you just need to press the button with the right timing. Bat Master does have a delicate carving minigame and a short test run after, but it is the weakest of the set since it offers very little and by the time you buy it you’ll likely have grown accustomed to the batting speed enough that you won’t need the minute help a custom bat provides.

The nine other packages are thankfully more robust. Each one features 25 challenges to work through and 25 advanced ones to complete after you’ve done enough of the initial set, most of these variations of the minigame’s core concept but some include extra forms of play or twists that require you to think about things in a different manner. Each pack essentially contains 10 formats for the minigame concept to take with 5 variations within that, usually just being an evolution in difficulty such as speeding things up or requiring the player to earn more points. Clearing a challenge only requires you to hit the defined score threshold without messing up too many times and you’ll unlock the next tier of that challenge for doing so, but you’re also given a medal to mark your performance so you can come back to the quick little games later to try and earn a better score. The Challenge medals aren’t required for anything, and since the designs of the challenges can become quite difficult the optional act of trying to earn them provides a good reason to return to the game without blocking any of the content you bought from play so long as you can simply beat one challenge to unlock the next.

Bat & Switch is the first minigame pack you’ll be getting and it seems like a fairly expected angle for a baseball-themed minigame to take. Just press a button to swing the bat at an incoming pitch, but once the pitching machine sprouts legs and arms and starts throwing wacky pitches your way, Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball starts to show it’s not afraid to add unusual twists to the game. You’ll still be trying to time your swings right against the pitching robots across the challenges, but their requirements change as do the complications. Some are simple like the pitchers throwing the ball at different speeds while others can include things like a ball that disappears mid-flight or even the need to knock UFOs out of the sky with the balls you hit. Beating a single minigame usually only takes a minute or two, but as their difficulty increases and their concepts require you to do things like time your swing to actually influence its flight path, the challenge becomes more compelling and easy to get sucked up in. The core action usually remains simple across all of the minigame packages so that you are developing one or two skills and adjusting based on the latest twist to the formula, but Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball also has quite a bit of an imagination when it comes to shaking up the design so that being skillful in one batch of challenges won’t trivialize another.

Batting also emerges as the main focus in a few other content packs. Volley Bat still has you swinging, but now you control two batters who are knocking the ball between each other, new complications including trying to pass it through aerial hoops while doing so or needing to do it quickly enough that the bomb you’re hitting back and forth doesn’t have time to detonate. Cage Match is a bit more grounded than most, the minigame set about hitting balls at a batting cage with the option to earn more points if the ball hits certain objects in the facility. Things can still get more involved and interesting here like the lightning pitches that zip around the air wildly or having multiple machines firing towards you in rapid succession, but Cage Match does feel like it focuses more on gradually evolving the challenge to be tighter and faster as its form of evolution. Drop & Pop feels like an entirely different sort of challenge to these timing based games though, the idea being that you must press the right button or direction on a tall set of tires to hit them, a whole stack with varying inputs meaning you have to be quick and precise if you want to clear them in time. Some timing challenges do exist here like ones where the target falls from the sky and you need to swing right to hit it before it’s gone, but this mode is much more about button pressing dexterity and manages to ensure that even though the baseball bat is featured in many games, quite a few of them at least shake up the design so that they provide new experiences.

The Aim Game bundle does admittedly feature a little retreading with its bat games, these more about timing the swing to hit aerial targets to earn points or get around barriers that block the outfield, but The Aim Game also features pitching games as well. By moving your 3DS system you’re able to aim your throw to try and hit distant targets or even incoming meteors. Pitching minigames do let you throw at your own pace sometimes compared to the quick and tight design of other minigames and lining up your pitch can become more about precision than speed in certain formats, but it is a bit of a shame they had another batting game variation eat up some challenges here when pitching certainly had room to add more twists. Gear Games is another multi-genre pack of sorts, this featuring minigames where you do things like cleaning gloves with the touch screen or bouncing a ball up and down in the air on the end of the bat by moving your 3DS in a similar manner. These do again have less room to iterate since they’re sharing a package with other game designs, but the variety here was probably the wiser move since they do all have a few variations on their format but the broader package is probably more interesting than more mild difficulty variations.

The last two minigame packs are Feel the Glove and Make the Call and manage to mix more robust realizations of their concepts with play that breaks away even further from the concepts featured in other games. Feel the Glove is focused on catching and fielding, the game actually featuring a few different ways to play that all still tie to that concept. One game might have you tilting your 3DS back to try and catch a fly ball in the center of the screen while another has the buttons and control stick used to run around and catch grounders before they roll or bounce by. Another format has you only controlling a glove on screen as you need to press the direction of the incoming ball to snag it as close to the last second as possible for maximum points, many of the games in the entirety of Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball rewarding you for spot on timing with more points but allowing weaker performances to still eventually earn a win so long as you don’t miss too much. Feel the Glove’s internal variety but concept consistency might make it the soundest package even if tilting your 3DS around to catch pop flies is not as deep as the movement focused fielding games, but Make the Call also provides a strong package as well as its games involve playing the role of the umpire. Challenges will ask for you to identify incoming pitches in a few different ways such as being able to identify what kind of throw was made, whether or not the ball was in the strike zone, or even keeping track of all the balls and strikes while a batter is up. The game introduces the concepts well and has helpful tools like a visible strike zone on screen between pitches so you can do your job well, and with memorization and good identifying skills being tested it feels like it draws from different skills than the other minigames that mostly focuses on quick precision.

On top of the 50 minigames most game packages consist of, there are also two endurance challenges included in each set that the game calls Hi-Score Derbys. Some of these take a minigame concept like hitting or catching and simply extend it indefinitely until you fail, but even within these long form versions you can expect complications so it’s not just a matter of continually doing the same action as long as possible. Others will instead ask you to perform as best as possible within a limited span of time or with a limited amount of pitches, and while not every minigame format gets a Hi-Score Derby, these do provide a different feel from the usually zippy pace of the minigames on offer. Also, the Hi-Score Derbys do provide rewards if you manage to get the A-rank gold medals, the Mii you play as able to get new outfits to wear, adding another layer of longevity to a package of minigames that are good for sit down play as well as brief visits when you have a sliver of spare time. Considering you don’t need every minigame pack to complete the story you could conceivably mix and match which packages you plan to buy, but most of them justify their price tag with an interesting set of varied challenges even if a few clearly bring something more unique to the table that tests different skills.

THE VERDICT: Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball provides a creative set of baseball themed minigames that goes beyond the expected set of ideas, the embrace of options like fielding and umpire work over just batting and pitching providing a more diverse experience further enhanced by the challenge system adding difficult but achievable iterations to each design on show. The short minigames do have some basic ones that aren’t quite as interesting to return to or see evolved in minute ways, but Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball also makes a game out of trying to spend as little real money as possible, Rusty’s story already an amusing tale and the haggling process weaving into it rather well. While a few ideas like Bat Master don’t justify their presence enough, the minigames are entertaining even once all of the negotiations are done so the microtransaction system’s novelty isn’t required to enjoy the experience.

And so, I give Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball for Nintendo 3DS…

A GOOD rating. Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball has both an amusing story line and a creative set of games that could have worked rather well even without its oddball concept of allowing the player to negotiate the price for the minigames on offer, perhaps as a game shop where you spend the things you earn from the Stamp Card only. Considering how kind the game is in regards towards pushing you away from the full price purchases it is good that the game made the act of haggling entertaining beyond simply getting a better deal, Rusty an energetic character with comedic antics and unusual circumstances to make learning how his life will develop a worthy through line beyond simply a means to exploit his situation for personal gain. The quality of the minigames is definitely what ensures the game’s value though, with only Bat Master standing out as something that truly feels undercooked for its limited scope and minimal influence. Sure a game like Cage Match won’t go to the same wild places of batting down UFOs and stopping meteor strikes with pitches and it also repeats the batting concept featured in many other minigame sets, but it still brings some new shifts in how you approach the short challenges so its not truly retread ground. By having game sets that pursue a wide range of formats it offsets the repeat appearances or variations that aren’t too ambitious, but having the climb in difficulties also ensures that the potential of some of its more interesting minigame types are able to reach a point where they’re challenging rather than simply novel.

Unfortunately, at the time of writing the 3DS eShop is facing its impending demise, meaning the novel approach to microtransactions will soon condemn Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball to being impossible to experience in its intended form. As said it could be possibly salvaged with a conceptual rework, but once the shop is down you not only will be unable to talk down the price of the minigame packs, but you’ll be entirely unable to purchase them. There may be workarounds in less scrupulous parts of the internet, but Rusty’s Real Deal Baseball is in an odd spot where its story depends on the haggling element and it provides a comedic diversion between a quality set of minigames. While Nintendo entered the new domain of microtransactions in a novel way, it unfortunately was quicker to embrace retiring digital purchases than the competition, thus condemning a game that was both a unique experiment and an enjoyable minigame collection to be practically unplayable. If you do manage to play a working version though, it still has a lot of interesting concepts to engage with beyond just how it aimed to make money.