Baseball Stars 2 (Neo Geo CD) Playthrough

A playthrough of SNK's 1996 baseball game for the Neo Geo CD, Baseball Stars 2.

In this video I play through the entire Pennant Race mode's Exciting League as the USA Bisons.

Baseball Stars 2 was originally released for the Neo Geo MVS and AES platforms back in 1992, and the CD version showed up not too long after the US launch of the Neo Geo CD system. It was the third game in the mainline Baseball Stars series, preceeded by Baseball Stars and Baseball Stars Professional on the Neo Geo and followed by Baseball Stars and Baseball Stars Color on the Neo Geo Pocket and Neo Geo Pocket Color, respectively.

Back in the early 90s, arcade and console baseball games were a dime a dozen, so a game really needed to be something special to stand out from the crowd.

SNK's Baseball Stars 2 was immediately hailed as the next best thing when it first came out. Though it lacked any official players or teams, the flashy, big budget presentation and fast, smooth gameplay put it leagues ahead of its competition.

The game features a standard exhibition mode as well as a season mode in the form of a 15-game pennant race, and both modes offer the choice of six fictional teams and two levels of difficulty: the "fighting league" automates fielding while the "exciting league" leaves everything up to the player.

Being an arcade game, the controls are fairly straightforward and keep in-line with what had become standard for the genre, and everything has been streamlined to make it nice and easy to pick up and play. However, the game does offer a bit more depth than you might expect from a coin-op sports game.

Each time you win a game in the pennant race, you'll be given a refreshed stock batter power-up items and your choice of a power player to take the place of someone on your team. These come in useful for the later games to balance out the ever-increasing skill of the CPU players.

But what really sold people on Baseball Stars 2 was the quality of the graphics and sound. The characters are huge, animated facial portraits zoom around the screen to show the condition of the players, and everyone visibly reacts to whatever is happening on the field. (You gotta love it when the pitcher gets clocked after beaning a batter!) The chatty commentator's voice samples are nice and clear, the sound effects are weighty and impactful, and the cheesy music does a good job of keeping up the energy.

The Neo Geo CD port is virtually identical to the original MVS and AES versions, but the music is of much better quality and the game uses the system's internal backup memory to save progress instead of requiring a memory card. The entire game is also loaded into the system memory upon boot, so once the game starts, you won't see any loading screens.

It's not as deep as some of the more sim-oriented baseball games of its time and the base-running controls can be a bit awkward, but Baseball Stars 2 is so enthusiastically over-the-top that I can't help but love it.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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