Classic EGM review: Reggie Jackson Baseball for Sega Master System

[parallaxscroll]

From Electronic Gaming Monthly - Issue Number 2 - July, 1989.

[Greg2600]

Whoever wrote that was either on the SEGA dime, or just MAD!!!!

[Tanooki]

Is it that bad to again point out the obvious that EGM was on the Sega love train its entire existence until Sony took that crown away? I owned it out of lot once, never touched it really as I had no interest as I;m happy in that period with NES Baseball and Baseball Stars.

[SparTonberry]

They saw The Naked Gun. They knew not to give Reggie a bad review!

[celerystalker]

I can agree that it was better than Great Baseball, but there are at least 10 better baseball games on the NES. Matter of fact, just for kicks, Baseball Stars, Baseball Stars II, Little League Baseball, Bad News Baseball, RBI Baseball 1-3, Major League Baseball, Baseball Simulator 1.000, and Tecmo Baseball off the top of my head were all way better than Mr. October's game.

[Tanooki]

Weren't the 'Great ...' sports games fairly well known as a joke titling due to how crappy in general they were against their NES counterparts? I guess honesty and advertising would hurt calling it the 'Not so Great ...' sport game even if they were.

[celerystalker]

Yep, the Great series is widely known to suck, and unlike so many unfairly criticized games, they pretty well earned every bit of it. Great Golf is okay as primitive golf games go, but the awkward trackball sports controller for games like Great Hocjey was unwieldly, and the others were just very primitive compared to what else was out at the time. Reggie Jackson's Baseball was pretty playable, but had weird quirks like menu-based pitching and a field that randomly changed colors when the system is powered on. Even in its time, its only saving grace was that every other baseball game on the Master System sucked so hard.

On the positive side, thinking about 8-bit baseball made me pull out and play Tecmo Baseball again. It's no Baseball Stars, but it's basically Bases Loaded: Stop Sucking Edition.

[Greg2600]

Is it that bad to again point out the obvious that EGM was on the Sega love train its entire existence until Sony took that crown away? I owned it out of lot once, never touched it really as I had no interest as I;m happy in that period with NES Baseball and Baseball Stars.

Well, SEGA was cooperative with the mags back then. Nintendo had a policy of allowing major game news to be broken only in Nintendo Power. That fostered a dislike for Nintendo by many of the magazine writers and editors.