I loved baseball stars! Amercian Dreams (I think that is what they were called), Ruth, Aaron, Mays, etc, etc….. I loved how you could rob homers!!!! And create guys/teams and power up your players with each win!

RBI was the first baseball video game I ever played, so I have a soft spot for it. It was also the first game, as far as I know, to have an MLBPA license in order to use real players. Baseball Stars was a better game (I especially loved powering up my own team), but the MLBPA license and the fact that I had a friend who owned RBI ensured that I played RBI more.

Major League Baseball was one of the few NES baseball games I never played – I played Baseball Stars, Roger Clemens, Bo Jackson, Bases Loaded 1 & 3, RBI 1-3, even Base Wars and Little League Baseball (which was awesome – it used the same game engine as Baseball Stars), but never MLB. Did it have real players, or was it just the MLB license without the MLBPA one (like Griffey on the SNES, where they changed everyone’s names)?

Basically every NES baseball game used the same perspective for the batter/pitcher view (RBI was the first one I played, but I doubt it pioneered that view). The primary exception was the Bases Loaded series, which showed things from the pitcher’s perspective and showed vertical as well as horizontal pitch movement (RBI’s only vertical movement was an unhittable “drop ball” thrown by pressing up on the controller – many games had some version of that, too). RBI and Baseball Stars also used the same controls, so if you knew how to play one, you could pick up the other fairly quickly.

For the jumping really high question, my guess is that maybe you’re thinking of Baseball Simulator 1.000, which I can’t believe I forgot to list in my other post – it had “Ultra Plays”, which allowed players to make special types of hits, pitches, and defensive plays, including a super-high jump. I don’t recall whether there was anything like that in Base Wars, but it’s been many a year since I’ve played that one. It was a futuristic baseball game played by robots, and when there was a tag play, the batter and fielder would fight to the death to determine the out. I always found that guys with light sabers worked really well.