In 1988 a Japanese videogame developer, called Namco, put out the second greatest sports game of all time. The greatest sports game of all time is obviously Blades of Steel from Konami, but in 1988 R.B.I. Baseball for the Nintendo Entertainment System cemented it’s runner up title with solid and fun game-play elements.
Fast forward to 2014, just as 2K Sports decided to get out of the licensed videogame baseball business, Major League Baseball itself announced that it would be reviving the R.B.I. Franchise.
This new edition in the R.B.I. franchise, simply called R.B.I. 14 by the new development staff, will feature all 30 big league teams. There will be 480 combined players on the various rosters of those 30 teams, and each player will have characteristics based on the hundreds of millions of data points found in the statistical database of Major League Baseball.
Unfortunately there is no specific release date yet, but R.B.I. 14 is excepted to come to the PlayStation®3, Xbox 360® PlayStation®4, Xbox One and mobile devices in the very near future.
Now the biggest question up until this point was how will Major League Baseball handle this version of the game? Would it be a simple port of what we played in 1988 or would it be so alien that we would never recognize it? The images at the end of this blog post were recently released by Major League Baseball, and they’re the first visuals we’ve seen of R.B.I 14. They show a game that is not alien to me, but clearly it is not what I was playing in the late 80s.
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