Nintendo 64Overview
Major League Baseball is one of the few games Nintendo has published that was a affiliated with an official sports league. At the time of release, Nintendo was the owner of the Seattle Mariners, and Ken Griffey Jr. was the Mariners all star center fielder (Nintendo has since sold their majority stake in the team). Nintendo used their authority as owners of the Mariners to feature Griffey Jr. in their game. The game featured all the official teams, players, and parks that were a part of MLB at the time of release. Griffey Jr. also supplied his voice for spoken commentary in the game.
Gameplay
Major League Baseball featured robust features for a arcade style baseball game. There is a Exhibition, Season Mode, and Home Run Derby, and these modes act as they would in most baseball games. Every single player in the game had their stats used in the game, and they usually played according to their stats. In order to hit the ball you were given a cursur to line up with the ball and hit, and the players stats decided how big their cursor would be. Griffey Jr. for example had a large cursor considering his offensive stats at the time of release. Major League Baseball was a very simple and accessible game because of its arcade style set up. Games would often be high scoring because of it's arcade nature. You could make batting more difficult by removing your cursor or you could set the defense to manual allowing you to control defensive portions of the game. These changes could make the game considerably more difficult.
Major League Baseball also featured multiplayer for players to compete in various modes. All of the game modes except for the Season Mode could be used for multiplayer. The game also had an interesting feature that would allow you to tour the stadiums in the league at the time. To tour the stadium you could use the analogue stick on N64 controller to move about the park.
Additionally the game featured various button command cheats, including one specifically that would allow Ken Griffey Jr to raise his bat towards the center field bleachers, essentially calling his shot. On the very next pitch, if the player made contact with the ball Griffey Jr would hit a homerun, no matter the location of the pitch. The command to perform the called shot is: Left, Left, Right, Right, Right, Left, Left on the C-Buttons.
There are also two unlockable teams after the player wins the World Series in Season Mode. Players can go all 162 games, or if they choose they can pick "Pennant Race" as season duration and only play roughly 25 games, depending on a teams schedule. The unlockable teams were "Angel Studios", the developer, and "Nintendo", the games publisher. The names used for each teams were developers who worked on the game.
