Culture Brain Announces a New Baseball Game, and It Looks Terrible

Posted 17:21 EST on 07FEB2014 by: tim walker in features » baseball simulator 1.000, culture brain, flying dragon, hiryu no ken

After nearly a 20-year hiatus, 8-bit era survivor and Hiryu-no-Ken System originators Culture Brain have announced a new game in their Chojin Ultra Baseball series (known in the west as Baseball Simulator 1.000).

The new game, Chojin Ultra Baseball: Action Card Battle, will be released for the Nintendo 3DS in Japan this March, and it looks terrible. Gloriously terrible.

Allow me to explain….

Founded in 1980, Culture Brain rose to the height of its fame (or infamy, if you will) in the U.S. during the NES era as strangers in a strange land who just didn’t quite fit in. Their games, like Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll and Kung-Fu Heroes, were not always technical masterpieces (partially because of the amount of time it took for them to reach these shores, and partially because of them not being state-of-the-art products to begin with). Their print ads (see below) were bizarre, headache-inducing pieces of work, packed to the brim with mistranslated/poorly-worded text. Even their name seemed out of place in an era of Konamis and Taitos.

Despite many of their games looking and sounding dated, Culture Brain releases almost always had some little nugget of brilliance buried deep within that kept me playing despite their flaws. Sure, Flying Dragon: The Secret Scroll might have all of the fluidity of a shark trying to swim through a lake of Bisquick, but it also had a pretty neat idea for a combat system. The Magic of Scheherazade was a legitimately great RPG that was too far ahead of the curve in many of its experimental concepts to gain widespread popularity. And Baseball Simulator 1.000 did not look as technically impressive as other NES baseball games at the time, but the Ultra Moves created an experience unique to the platform.

Which brings us to the new game. At first glance, it looks pretty bad: The polygonal graphics look horribly dated (bad even by 3DS standards) and lack detail, animation is somewhat stilted, and the game is not priced like a budget title (it will retail for roughly $48 U.S., about the same price as The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds sells for in Japan). Oh, and it’s also a card game: Players do not actually control their baseball team, but instead choose which pitch and hit cards to play during each round.

That said, Culture Brain may still have a diamond in the rough on their hands. For one thing, the level of absurdity that appears to dominate this game is delightful. A couple of GIFs from Hachima Kikou perfectly illustrate the tone they’re going for:

     

The storyline for the game (translated from the official website is also pretty out there: “It is an age of tremendous popularity worldwide for Superhuman Baseball and the Ultra League. The World Ultra Baseball Cup (WUBC) will be held to determine the world’s greatest Superhuman Baseball team! Through a certain chain of events, Kiryu and Torajiro, who are attending the Alcatraz Baseball School, were asked to participate in the WUBC…” This sort of gonzo setup is perfectly in line with the bizarre storylines that were printed in the manuals for their NES games, and shows that they haven’t completely deviated from their origins, even 25 years later.

Another thing to remember about Culture Brain is what I stated in my opening line of this article: They are survivors. Think about it: How many Japanese publishers from the NES era are still around today in their original forms? Many have merged with rivals to survive (Tecmo with Koei, Square with Enix), while others winked out of existence some time ago (Data East, Jaleco, Technos). Culture Brain has never been hugely successful as an entity, yet they’re still here today, and they’re still publishing games (their peak output seems to have been in 2004 (when they released 11 titles), but they still consistently publish 2-3 games per year). In an industry where developers and publishers go under on a regular basis, that’s admirable, and shows that they’re doing something right, despite the questionable merits of their products.

Chojin Ultra Baseball: Action Card Battle will probably not hit the top of the sales charts, but it may prove to be quirky enough to merit your attention. Here’s hoping that it generates enough cash for Culture Brain to keep the lights on for a bit longer so that they can continue to both mystify and entertain us in their own special way.

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