Saturday, May 31, 2008

Cutest videogame ever


It came from Japan...to make you giggle. Check out MLB Power Pros, a baseball game with the full MLB licenses (i.e. all the real teams and players) but rendered in the goofy, huge-eyed, Japanimation art style.

All the real players are completely recognizable by their details -- Manny Ramirez's dreadlocks, Eric Gagne's goggles, and Alex Rodriguez's eternally-frowning eyebrows are all present and distinguishable -- but in hilarious anime guise.

What's funniest about the game is that it's actually a very realistic baseball simulation. And in the famous tradition of Japanese sports games, there are soap operas running, too -- for example, each player has a "Motivation" rating that ebbs and flows based on how often you use him in the lineup. So you have to balance your optimal lineup choices with the need to get your backup players in often enough to stay Motivated.

Kudos to Japan for this delightful kiddie-ization of Major League Baseball. Too much fun.

3 comments:

rakiel said...

do the little cartoon players spit all the time? ha ha

Daniel Morris said...

Actually their funniest animation is when the umpire calls a strike and the batter disagrees: the batter turns and squints angrily at the ump.

Brotherman said...

It's interesting that at the same time as animation makes huge leaps forward in realistic motion, behavior and appearance, to the point that some human animations seem down right creepy because the're so realistic but not quite right, that there is also a trend to simpler graphics like the 8 bit generated graphics on whatever that show is called with the pathetic graphics.