MVP Baseball 2004

Electronic Arts, while legendary in the sports genre throughout the 1990s on account of perennial favorites like the Madden NFL, NBA Live and NHL series, could never quite get baseball right. While it boasted the best in football, basketball and hockey, EA failed to hit the grand slam with a great baseball sim. EA’s first foray into the national pastime was Tony La Russa’s Baseball, a multiplatform series which, like its namesake, was competent but lacked personality. EA tried again with MLBPA Baseball in 1994, but the game proved unengaging in view of its cartoonish graphics, lack of major league teams, and blustery gameplay. Giving up on the MLBPA line, EA soon after launched Triple Play Baseball, a capable simulation with quality graphics and the immersive EA feel that had made the company's other sports titles stand out. However, the 16-Bit Triple Play offerings also lacked the MLB license, and were buggy. (If you had, for example, a runner on first who had rounded second before a fly ball had been caught, you could return to the bag by leaving the base-paths and running across the infield grass.) EA kept Triple Play around for the length of the N64/PlayStation era, but the games gradually declined in quality, becoming increasingly arcadey over the years. The last of the Triple Play offerings for PS, N64, and PS2 have not aged favorably.

Three strikes did not make an out for EA, however, and the company inaugurated its fourth attempt at a baseball franchise with MVP Baseball 2003. The game featured very good graphics and a meter-based pitching and fielding mechanic, adding an unprecedented level of depth to aspects of baseball that were typically underdeveloped in even the most thoroughgoing simulations to that point. MVP 2003 was still far from perfect, though: just listen for the excessively woody, wallopy bat-on-ball sound effect and you'll quickly understand why the game is best enjoyed with the volume muted.

The next year, though, EA finally delivered its long-awaited baseball masterpiece. MVP Baseball 2004 kept all the positive features of its predecessor while polishing the presentation. The result was one of the most beautiful representations of America's pastime in any artistic medium. The confines are comely, with lovingly rendered major league stadiums, chatter-friendly minor league parks and even some classic old-timey ball-yards. As for gameplay, MVP 2004 segues from pitcher-batter duels to making the putout to slow-motion replays with a silky smoothness, transforming this sport commonly criticized for its glacial pace into a delightfully breezy visual and tactile experience. Every time you go yard, you feel it in your forearms. And you'll go yard a lot, as the game is generous with the homeruns; that said, MVP Baseball 2004 never feels like anything other than a straight-laced simulation.

If you’re looking for a better baseball game than MVP 2004, you’re really only left with the following year's MVP 2005. Even with the more powerful systems that came along in subsequent years and decades, few baseball games since have even approached these two EA offerings in quality. While MVP 2005 is the superior version, your correspondent confesses a special partiality for MVP 2004. It is, after all, the last game in which you can play as his beloved Montreal Expos, the only means by which you can still sky a towering blast into the bone-white ceiling of that major league mausoleum Stade Olympique while decked in blue pinstripes. On those grounds alone, MVP Baseball 2004 will never, for your correspondent, get old. It’s the spring, summer and fall of 2004 forever.

Mortal Kombat XL

The double-entendre evoked by the Roman numerals in the title of Mortal Kombat XL, while only minimally clever, nonetheless speaks volumes as to what the game actually offers. Here we have the most polished, most complete version of the tenth iteration of the legendary Mortal Kombat series, well-peopled with thirty-plus characters including newcomers like the pert, pony-tailed Cassie Cage, millennial daughter of Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade, as well as the six-gun-slinging Roland of Gilead rip-off Erron Black.

Leatherface-hugger

It is, however, the all-inclusive downloadable content which not only makes XL truly worthy of the Mortal Kombat mantle, but also further burgeons the franchise's legacy. Out of the box, we are graced with four characters external to but totally amenable with the MK universe: these are the eponymous sci-fi super-beasts from Alien and Predator, as well as insuperable slasher-cycle icons Jason Voorhees and Leatherface. We have, of course, already witnessed Alien vs. Predator in a series of cinematic endeavors bearing that very title, though the peculiar species of manic, Manichean matchup that Mortal Kombat makes possible justifies a re-visitation of that particular battle. And while Jason and Leatherface have previously appeared in horrendous sprite-based releases for NES and Atari 2600, respectively, we had never until the release of XL seen them rendered in polygonal HD (at least until we got to be the hockey-masked maniac in 2017’s Friday the 13th: the Game), and we had certainly never seen them go one-on-one. Thus, XL facilitates a horror-movie dream match, Jason vs. Leatherface, a film you can play out over and over again across various backdrops from the Mortal Kombat mythscape. And how about Jason vs. Alien, Predator vs. Leatherface, or even Jason vs. Scorpion? The list of possibilities goes on and on. In essence, XL is the Mortal Kombat franchise fully realizing its own slasher, splatterpunk and even sci-fi sensibilities.

These were briefly explored earlier on in its 2011 precursor, which included a somewhat tepid representation of Freddy Krueger among its selectable characters. XL does far better justice to its sci-fi and horror guest stars, however. On account of its veritable shock-and-schlock, mashup-mandating Jason Takes Outworld aesthetic, then, Mortal Kombat XL will prove to be a collector's item, at least for horror and B-Movie fans.

Friday the 13th

By 1989, the sanguinary Friday the 13th series and its bloodthirsty antihero Jason Voorhees had thoroughly saturated the North American marketplace. The movies, aesthetically and conceptually lacking though they may have been, were ubiquitous in popular culture, with a sequel in release or in production every single year in the 1980s. There was also a TV series bearing the Friday name and font which managed to gain modest critical acclaim—in no small part due to the complete absence of Jason Voorhees from the show. Alice Cooper had even laid down a straining shock-rock record—“The Man Behind the Mask”—inspired by the goalie-masked goliath. Inevitably, given the Nintendo Entertainment system's embeddedness in the day-to-day lives of children of the mid-to-late eighties, video-gaming was another market Friday the 13th would encroach upon, the R-rated aesthetics of the movies notwithstanding.

Friday the 13th for the NES took the form of a side-scroller in which players control one of six Crystal Lake camp counselors. Traversing water, woods and cabins, all the while battling wolves, crows and zombies (all of which are apocryphal to the movies), the goal is to find and defeat Jason Voorhees not once, not twice, but thrice. In the meantime, the rampaging Jason is killing not only the counselors, but also the children—yes, children—vacationing at the camp. Jason's mother's head, which has now acquired the extra-canonical ability to fly, also makes an appearance as an adversary.

This discussion of Friday the 13th’s gameplay is moot, however, as the game is unplayable. Its controls are exceedingly frustrating, leading to death after death for the counselor under your control (and the children, to boot). Moreover, the camp's confines are mostly rendered in bright, primary colors and thus provide little in the way of chills. The programmers, of course, had very little to work with given the 8-bit NES format, but still, one gets the impression they didn't even attempt to approximate the Friday the 13th aesthetic. There is also, perhaps most disappointingly, no opportunity to play as Jason. This is not a huge loss, however, as Jason is, when you do find him, clad in what looks to be a purple track-suit of some sort—seemingly more like senior's active wear than the ragged waterlogged vestments we would expect of an undead serial killer who dwells at the bottom of a lake.

I wouldn't recommend this game to even the most diehard fans of the film series. Firstly, it received far too wide a release to have any value as a collector's item. Secondly, it evades the hallowed so-bad-it's-good status, which may apply to movies such as those in the series, but really doesn't work for video games. Even the recent Friday the 13th release for Xbox One and PS4, while far from perfect, is at least able to capture the general feel of the films. The NES game, by contrast, is an abomination. Collectors would be better off saving their cash for anything else related to the series. This reviewer would instead suggest perusing EBay for the two—that's right, not one, but two—novelizations of Friday the 13th Part 3. One is by Simon Hawke, the other by movie-adaptation legend Michael Avallone. Even if you despise Friday the 13th or the act of reading itself, you will still appreciate these novels far more than this game.

Chrono Trigger

The holy grail of game collecting is, quite arguably, Chrono Trigger for Super Nintendo. Complete-in-box, you’ll be paying hundreds of dollars on EBay; for a sealed copy, you may pay over a thousand. Even without a box and manual, a Chrono Trigger cartridge can run well over a hundred. The price is warranted, for the demand is there. Even when we look past the trans-historical intrigue of the story-line spanning prehistoric pasts and dizzying technocratic futures, even when we look beyond the endearing banter of the characters and the silky-smooth combat system and the enchanting trill of the soundtrack, Chrono Trigger sparks, perhaps most palpably, a strikingly vivid nostalgia. Just as the characters in the game jump through time, so too does CT shuttle us back to childhood, when we were most capable of complete immersion—often from waking to slumber—in a video game and the luxuriant world it conjured on our television screen. The Chrono Trigger cartridge is itself a teleporter to the past. But, as TV and movies recurrently warn us, there is no time travel without risk: If you do put down the admirable amount of cash necessary to secure a sealed or near-mint copy of Chrono Trigger, be prepared to face the temptation toward unlimbering the cartridge from its casing, husking it in your old weather-beaten SNES, and firing it up once again. With this possibility in mind, I would recommend the diligent collector pick up a relatively cheaper, possibly even disc-only copy of the Chrono Trigger/Final Fantasy II re-release for the PlayStation 1. Herein you can sublimate quite satisfactorily your urge to re-experience the epic expedition of Crono, Marle and Lucca—and also your youth, too—without sundering the value of a bona fide collector’s item.