Crushed Baseball (GBA)

Crushed Baseball was originally a more ambitious project, aiming to bring baseball with a twist to the GameCube and PlayStation 2. Promising interactive stadiums where you can do things like smash a ball through stained glass to earn power for super moves, this vision would never come to be. However, a Game Boy Advance title with the same name would come out still, developed by a different team and even published by an entirely different company. Being on weaker hardware than the home consoles of the time likely limited how much of the original vision could be realized by this new team, but the Crushed Baseball game we did get feels like it’s a bit leery to stray away from standard baseball play.

 

Crushed Baseball plays primarily like a normal adaptation of the sport. The baseball fields might have some background details to evoke a karate dojo or watery realm, but the actual field remains a standard diamond and players will still be running bases and running after balls without any environmental gimmickry to contend with. One thing that does make Crushed Baseball at least look a little abnormal at a glance are the incredibly beefy ball players, many of them having squat heads that look almost squashed as many players are deliberately goofy looking or exaggerated. Facial features often don’t show while players are out on the field though, but the stats screen and things like the batting line-up show the slightly strange players on one of 10 original teams like the Seattle Tsunamis and Chicago Bouncers. Some players are a bit different though, there being a few female players scattered around the teams and even characters with animal heads, meaning sometimes you might see someone with ram horns or bear head step up to bat. They aren’t too different from standard players in terms of their capabilities though and unfortunately the game’s player creator only lets you make some more typical ball players, but it is still an amusing disruption when a man with a killer whale’s head shows up in the line-up.

Batting and pitching are the main focuses in Crushed Baseball, the game even having fielding set to be mostly automatic to start. You can turn it off and try to grab fly balls yourself with only some reasonable automation like having players in the right general area before you’re given control, but you can still control things like who you pass to even if you leave automated fielding on and base runners can also be commanded to keep running or steal. Pitching and batting both rely on a strike zone indicated by yellow corners, the pitcher able to choose where about they want to throw their pitch. The only other consideration the pitcher has is their pitching menu, players able to have four standard and four special pitches set you can access from a menu. Different players have different pitching options and one of the big perks of making a custom player beyond tinkering with stats is setting the pitches you want to use personally, but among normal things like fastballs you can have pitch types like knuckleballs and curveballs that help to offset a big edge that batters conceivably have.

 

Batters have a region in the strike zone that represents their bat’s impact point, the player able to move it around as they anticipate a pitch’s flight. Even a fastball is readable enough that you can move your impact indicator to the right point if you’re quick enough, and timing the button press will impact how far the ball will fly on top of the expected influence of things like the pitcher’s chosen throw. The batter will see a mark meant to show where the pitch is expected to enter the strike zone so they can decide if they want to swing for it or not, and it’s the unusual pitches that make this less than a guarantee since it might go a little astray. You’ll still likely hit if you swing with your bat indicator over the ball indicator, but adjusting for a sinking shot will make the hit fly better for example. Even though you can often see where you need to hit, Crushed Baseball isn’t made incredibly easy by this approach to hitting, the hit timing and other factors still meaning that the fielders might catch the ball easily and the actual score of a game is usually fairly reasonable so it feels competitive, although the skew can change based on your chosen difficulty for AI controlled teams. You’re fairly likely to hit a ball if you want to, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be knocking it out of the park consistently, a home run still sweet to finally achieve while more typical hits always leave you hoping you can slip by the fielders even when you know to anticipate capable play from the opposition.

Where Crushed Baseball starts to deviate from the norm truly is in its Mojo system. Both teams will passively build up power through their activities on the field, this Mojo allowing them to unleash special skills to try and gain a slight edge. The pitcher’s four special pitches on a second menu all draw from this, each batter has a specific batting power they can tap into, and fielders and base runners also have a single designated power for that part of play. While pitching a ball that turns into an evil skull is certainly a flashy power, Mojo abilities are often rather tame and light in scope regardless of what visual effects they might have. A pitcher’s fireball throw can be hit without much concern, a base runner’s speed boost doesn’t really seem to make them move that much faster, and a bat trick might just change the shape of the bat so it’s a bit easier to hit the ball. On some level, this keeps things fair and under control. Hearing a fielder can magnetize the ball to their glove sounds like it could lead to easy outs, but it mostly manifests as a ball that’s already rolling on the ground getting to a fielder’s glove maybe a second faster. A pitch that promises to hurl a decoy ball as well doesn’t change the indicator and the illusory ball travels pretty close so it’s not even likely the hitter’s timing will be messed with much. What these Mojo powers end up feeling like is more of a special garnish, and with some fairly plain ideas like powering up your bat to hit further among them, they are at least sometimes useful and if anything, easier to justify constant use of since their impact is small but still just observable enough that you might as well try for them if you have the energy.

 

Mojo being surprisingly reserved in its implementation doesn’t really sting too much since the baseball on offer is otherwise fairly solid and available in a few customizable formats. Exhibition is just a way to play a normal game, 2-Player lets you play with another owner of the game, although a Home Run Derby mode does offer a little challenge where it’s easier to hit it out of the park but timing your swings is still key to doing so consistently. League play is the more interesting format, although with only ten teams you’ll inevitable play the same teams constantly, especially since the game divides them into different conferences so you’ll only ever see a few of them until you make it to the championship game. Crushed Baseball’s league play is customizable in both expected ways and ones that shake up the format a bit more than expected. A normal league is a 94 game season (not counting the championship game) and while there is a save feature, that does feel like a lofty commitment when you’ll be playing against so few unique teams. You can cut this season down to 47, 23, or even just 12 games though, but a bit more interesting is the ability to alter other aspects that effect game time. You can set the innings anywhere between 1 and 9, although even a 1 inning game will keep going into extra innings until someone actually scores. More unusually, you can set how many outs it takes to end an inning half, how many strikes before a player is out, and even how many balls must be pitched before a player is walked. You can’t go above the normal amount, but you can conceivably do a 1 inning game where you only get 1 out before teams change and that out will happen on the first strike a batter gets, and while this certainly isn’t the best way to play, it is rather tense to know every at-bat is crucial and pretty much the first team to actually earn a point will win the game.

 

You can also customize how quickly Mojo is earned during a game, but it can’t be completely disabled. League also contains the player creator and lets you swap your team make-up as you like. However, none of your custom touches will be reflected in the way the voiced commentators speak. They’ll still talk about your player taking three strikes to go out even if you have it set to only require one and female players will still have the announcers use male pronouns, but everything is functional and responsive so these are minor complaints rather than a true disruption to the play. Crushed Baseball often does just feel like a competent baseball game on the Game Boy Advance, although at the same time making its little curiosities mandatory and lacking an official Major League Baseball branding does mean that players looking for competent baseball on the system might not have much interest in this subdued but slightly strange approach to the sport.

THE VERDICT: Crushed Baseball seems hesitant to embrace its more abnormal aspects but that at least ensures it doesn’t disrupt its standard baseball play. The Mojo system is more a small garnish that tips things one way or the other a little bit every now and then rather than a defining feature, but that also means other aspects like the limited number of unique teams stick out a bit more because there isn’t any big draw to help the game rise above other baseball video games. The customization options in the League mode are appreciated, but by not embracing either rich realistic play or far out super-powered insanity, Crushed Baseball ends up stuck in the middle where it only earns the faint praise of being a decent enough way to play the sport on the Game Boy Advance.

 

And so, I give Crushed Baseball for Game Boy Advance…

An OKAY rating. When it comes down to it, the main factor in Crushed Baseball will be the pitching and swinging because the gimmickry is so subdued, and the aiming system employed is a decent enough middle-ground where it’s not too demanding because there’s more to a hit than just lining up the indicators. The Mojo power system having such a small impact does make play a bit strange, the player not really needing to fear when they crop up from the opposition but also not having much excitement to look forward to if they decide to use one of their powers. This certainly doesn’t stack up next to something like Mario Superstar Baseball that can have both well handled baseball fundamentals on top of plenty of crazy powers and field gimmicks, but by not trying to push the envelope too much you get a game that at least can claim to not be a standard baseball experience even if it is at best slightly quirky. Having the powers have a greater impact would definitely be the wiser decision though, the stadiums and teams feeling like they’re going for a more extreme fantasy in terms of logos and naming only for the actual field to be plain and the players to only do things a little better than usual when a power comes into play. The Mojo system would need some rebalancing if things like getting a speed boost while running bases was actually quite effective, but being able to feel the impact of powers more would start to add interesting considerations to how you play and spend your power rather than just adding it over top now and then since you might as well.

 

Crushed Baseball didn’t need to try and be as flashy as the cancelled console games seemingly wanted to be, but it could have definitely benefited from embracing its peculiarities rather than taking the timid approach we’re left with now. Amp up the effects and impact of the Mojo abilities and Crushed Baseball could be something work checking out rather than a mostly effective sports game with a small amount of content in total. Most of the basics are in place, but Crushed Baseball had to aim for a home run with its alterations if it wanted to attract any attention beyond just being a baseball video game.