10 Best Baseball Video Games Ever, Ranked – Esquire.com

People don’t talk about this game, and I’m not sure anyone else remembers it, but this NES port for Japan’s Choujin Ultra Baseball pretty much set the tone for how I would watch (and later play) the sport for the rest of my life. That is, with complete and utter disappointment. How could the real thing ever live up to spinning, tornado-style batters or pitches thrown so fast they burst into flames? —Nate Erickson

Wii Sports was honestly a game with everything, hailing from the fifth seed on our list of best video games of all time. Wii Sports baseball was arguably the least popular of the Wii sports, but it is still a blast to play. That feeling of slamming one out of the park with the WiiMote is near irreplaceable. Make sure you tighten your wrist strap first. —Cam Sherrill

Base Wars existed in a universe where human baseball players were replaced by cybernetic robot warriors. Do you really need to know more? For a NES game, it boasted some pretty complex gameplay mechanics. The best part of the game, inarguably, was the robot battles that occurred whenever there was a close call. In my opinion, this is the future of the MLB. —Dom Nero

One of the largest and wildest casts in Mario sports game history could be found in Sluggers. It had a surprisingly in-depth team-building system, allowing players to pick one of 12 team captains and fill out a roster with odd, deep-cut characters from the Mario universe. And it actually mattered who you paired up. While this was more or less a remake of Mario Superstar Baseball for the GameCube, Sluggers added King K Rool and baby DK to the field. For that alone, it deserves the seventh slot on our list. —C.S.

I remember picking up The Bigs and thinking, “Finally, they made NFL Blitz for baseball.” Whereas other titles on this list emphasize the meticulous detail that goes into every pitch, every batting stance, and every foul ball, 2K Sports’ The Bigs gave us gigantic, lumbering, ball-playing mammoths, with fiery bats, hyper-speed fastballs, and enough plate-side collisions to make baseball feel like a full-on contact sport. Finally. —D.N.

For many, RBI Baseball from Atari Games was the OG ball-playing simulator. It was special because, unlike other games of the time, it featured actual player names from the current MLB roster, which would soon become the norm for these sorts of sports games. With its robust stats system and varying abilities for individual players, this title would in many ways set the tone for the sub-genre of pro-sports video games. The franchise got a reboot in 2014, which was similar in spirit to the old-school title. But for many of us longtime fans, RBI for the NES is still the way to go. —D.N.

Now this, sports fans, is a baseball game. Picking up where Base Wars left off, SNK’s Super Baseball 2020 upgraded the mortal sport of baseball with android abilities and power-ups. All the games were played in the bright green Cyber Egg Stadium, and 2020 introduced upgrade purchases that buffed up certain stats and allowed players to quite literally blow each other up. With the actual year 2020 coming up on the horizon, we’ll soon see if the real MLB will start to resemble Super Baseball 2020. —D.N.

This is the most realistic baseball video game to date, achieving unparalleled realism both visually and in gameplay. With updated commentary and new features such as the batting pose editor, MLB The Show 18 reached a new level for sports gaming. Besides deep team chemistry, its gameplay mechanics made it any baseball superfan’s fantasy. —C.S.

If you didn’t get Pablo on your team, you had already lost. This was the Sandlot of baseball games, with an eccentric cast of characters, wonderfully simple yet oddly confusing mechanics, and multiplayer abilities. While Backyard Baseball was more geared toward kids, it was still extremely fun to grow up with. Each player got to pick their team off the bleachers at the start of a round. The nerves I’d get hoping my adversary wouldn’t pick my star player have stuck with me to this day. —C.S.