Extra Bases was released to Japanese audiences in 1990, and to Americans in 1991. The gameplay is fairly simplistic, but I found it charming and addictive. The game's manual reads:
Now you can experience all the excitement of a neck and neck pennant race with EXTRA BASES(TM). There are 14 different teams to choose from. Pick your favorite and try for an undefeated season, or just have fun by randomly playing on all the different teams, picking your competition as you go along. You can pitch, bat, field, and run the bases just like in a professional baseball game. You can also control all the coaching decisions, like bringing in your ace relief pitcher or calling for a suicide squeeze play. So step up to the plate and Play Ball!!
An apt description!
It's probably true of pretty much any game that doesn't include a tutorial, but reading the manual linked above to get a grasp on the controls is essential before playing. Figuring out some things was easy enough without reading it, but as my frustration mounted in the middle of my first game, I found that most of the things I didn't understand were addressed. It's a short read, and will almost certainly help tremendously.
You first are asked to pick single or two player, and between 5 and 9 innings. Because I'm a purist, I've stuck with 9 inning games. You then advance to team selection, and choose first which team you will control from the 14 options. Once you make your selection, you can enter a 4-digit alphanumeric code to pick up from where you left off, or can just press A again and move on to selecting the CPU team. You then choose which stadium you wish to play at, which is unfortunately limited to two. As far as I can tell, the only real difference between the ballparks is cosmetic. Here, however, is my first point of frustration. As far as I can tell, the team the user picks will ALWAYS play as the visiting team.
Now is where the managerial decisions begin! You must select your starting pitcher from a list. Unfortunately, the only information you are given is which hand the pitcher throws with. This is my second point of frustration. We are told on page 14 of the manual that "A pitcher's overall ability can be determined by his E.R.A. You are not shown your pitcher's ERA until after you have selected him and the game has started. This means you are missing some pretty important information about the skill of the pitcher you are bringing in until you are familiar enough with all 14 teams to roughly know who is good and who is not. You also don't know the lineup of the team you are about to face, so good luck choosing if you'd rather toss a righty or lefty on the mound until you have that base familiarity with the opponents.
Once you have chosen your pitcher, the game begins!
Batting is fairly simple! You move your hitter around in the box by pressing the control pad and try to position yourself to hit the incoming pitch. The ball comes at you pretty quickly and with a lot of movement, so I actually felt it was a nice challenge. You press and hold the A button to swing, or can lightly tap it as the pitch comes in to square up to bunt. It's tough to master, but not too difficult to get good at quickly. Through the three games I've actually tracked so far, I've managed 22, 28, and 18 hits in 9-inning games, putting up 10, 19, and 13 runs. Offense definitely feels like a fairly easy thing to generate in this game.
There is a neat little mechanic where your hitter will sometimes be wiggling his bat. This means the hitter is lucky that AB, and will generate more power. All hitters are lucky in the 7th inning, so you can do some real damage in that frame.
The baserunning controls are simple. You point to the base you want your guy to run to with the D-Pad and press B to advance or A to go back. A minor gripe is that sometimes it's tough in the moment to tell whether you've hit a line drive or a ground ball, which sometimes results in an awkward and avoidable double play if my reaction times are a little too slow (they often are). I've also found that I line out to the pitcher A LOT, leading to quick double plays that are absolutely brutal. In one of my games, I hit into a 1-5-4 triple play...
That said, you can pretty easily take advantage of the slow throws from the fielders and get extra bases out of it. You may want to adopt a house rule around not taking an extra base because of poor AI logic to keep yourself from bludgeoning the computer with 20 runs a game.
The manual advertises you
Pitching has a touch more complexity. Before selecting your pitch, you can move around side to side on the rubber to control where around the plate your pitch will start. Pressing up selects a breaking ball and down a fastball. At the same time as you pitch, you can move the ball right or left to select a curve or screball. It's fun to vary your pitches and try to get the AI to whiff at something that ends in the other batter's box. Once or twice, I've gotten lucky and actually gotten them to swing at a pitch tht would have hit them, and yes, you can hit batters.
Pitching can be a little frustrating, at times. The AI does seem to jump on you randomly and can put up some hilarious numbers where they just hit everything you throw. I suppose this feels fair, though, as I've more or less done the same to them (22, 28, and 18 hits in 9-innings, remember?).
The manual advises you that sweat beads appearing around your pitcher's head indicates they are low on stamina, meaning your pitches get slower and far more hittable. Unfortunately, this seems to happen very quickly. Pitchers have obscenely low stamina, and I have seen the AI run out of pitchers by the seventh inning multiple times. I had one game where the AI was on their third pitcher and I was on my second by the end of the fourth inning. It's a little annoying having to pull your starter because they are already tired in a close game in the 3rd.
Fielding is, to me, the weakest part of the game by far. Your characters move around the field painfully slowly, and they all have noodle arms. A routine ground ball sharply hit to third will result in a hit more often than not, as the third baseman simply cannot throw to first without the ball rolling in. As soon as the ball is in play, your d-pad controls all fielders who are not actively covering a base. This means that if the ball is hit in such a way that maybe you need your shortstop to move to the right, but it gets past him, your center fielder has now also run all the way to right field and is well out of position.
Given the noodly arms, on a ground ball it is nearly always best to just make the out at second. I have only rarely been able to throw from 3rd to 1st, or 2nd to 3rd, or 2nd or SS to home effectively without having to position one of my free fielders as a cutoff man for a relay. Only rarely have I been able to turn a double play, even on ground balls that would be perfect for them. Just a little quirk of the game, and possibly a deliberate limitation to keep it more interesting.
Not every game has an atrocious number of errors, but some do. In one game, my shortstop had 2 errors in the first 3 innings, and had picked up a 3rd by the end of the game. I have had multiple games where the two teams combined for 5 errors on the day. Unforgivable!
This game is obviously imperfect, but given it's a 1991 baseball game for a handheld that came out in 1989, I'm willing to forgive all of that. I'm currently working my way through an attempt at an undefeated season and am very much enjoying it. You can play a complete 9-inning game in 20-30 minutes, even a pretty high scoring one. That's obviously a huge plus for a game on a heldheld device. The ability to pick it up, play 20 minutes, and be able to put it away and come back later is very nice. Just make sure to write down the password it gives you if you're going for a perfect season.