Backyard Baseball ('97) was the first video game I owned and I still play it today. 946 points 1 year ago 'We want a batter, not a broken ladder!' 517 points 1 year ago 'We want a pitcher! Here we can take pleasure in reminiscing about the good ol' days. Times we shared with.

1. We're down to the final four in our Baseball Video Game Tournament! Today's matchup features Backyard Baseball 2001 and Wii Sports, and Dave Cherman tells us why he loves these games.
2. The obvious number 1 and GOAT of Backyard Baseball is Pablo Sanchez — The Secret Weapon, he has nearly maxed out stats, and is the best character in the game. You pick him number 1, every time. Way too OP for a children’s sports game. He bats fourth in the line-up, with bases loaded, and it’s game over.

Hey, batter battHEY, BATTER BATTERWE WANT A BATTER, NOT A BROKEN LADDERwe want a batter not aSWING BATTER BATTSwing, batter bWE WANT Aswing, batterSWING BATTERwe want a batter not a broken ladderWE WANT A BATTERHEY, BATTERWe wantswingHEY BATHEYBATTERBATTERBATTER!!!

There, you've gotten a good 70% of the Backyard Baseball experience. The rest is 15% pop flies, 10% foul balls, 4.9% strikeouts, and 0.1% Jen Taylor squealing 'Caught in a pickle!' - just like the real thing.

• 1Unused Graphics
• 3Unused Dialogue
• 4Unused Text

Unused Graphics

Placeholder Headshots

The game contains a full set of placeholder character headshots for the strategy menu. They're stored in a different format from the final versions, which suggests the menu was overhauled at some point and the old graphics were forgotten about.

For what it's worth, this is probably the earliest available artwork showing the characters hatless.

Room Backgrounds

Several of the game's rooms are used only for storing data and don't need a background, but all of them have one anyway. Some are just blank, but a few are more interesting.

Rooms 16 and 19 store the background chatter for the female and male characters, respectively. Their background consists of the handwritten message 'Stupid talkies' against a very eye-displeasing background.

Room 22 contains the batting animations and this quirky message.

Room 25 holds most of the baseball logic, and a similar message to room 22.

Humongous Vision

A few placeholder graphics for the Humongous Vision display are still in the game.

This seems to be how the board looked early in development. Assuming it had the same placement at that point, the green bit at the bottom is the center point of the home run fence.

A placeholder version of the infield fly rule screen.

It's not clear what this is, but it's obviously meant to fit into the same 'slot' as the early Humongous Vision graphics. Possibly it was meant to simulate fields without the display for testing. Most likely, the brown thing on the right connected to some other placeholder graphic, now lost.

Collision Maps

There are several graphics in the game data which, when assembled and overlaid onto the baseball fields, seem to mark parts of the collision data for each area. They're incomplete, though every field except Tin Can Alley has at least one.

Cement Gardens

Dirt Yards

Eckman Acres

Playground Commons

The odd streak on the second base line is actually part of the tree graphic overlay in the bottom-right corner, so it's definitely in the right place. Who knows what it's doing there.

Sandy Flats

For some reason, a Steele Stadium component is stored with the Sandy Flats pieces.

Steele Stadium

Parks Department Field No. 2

Big City Stadium

Super Colossal Dome

Miscellaneous

Backyard Baseball We Want A Batter Man

A 'TEMP' version of the tournament bracket menu icon snuck into the final game.

This save/load preview placeholder is present in several other Humongous games. This game displays the teams and score instead of a graphical preview, so presumably this is just left over from whichever game this was built off of.

Camera Debugger

Room 6 seems to be the remnants of a camera debugging system, probably related to the pseudo-3D gameplay in the overhead field view. The buttons on the control panel are apparently programmed to adjust the specified parameters and print relevant debug text like 'camera X angle is %d', and there are several scripts in the room that are obviously meant to do something, but it's not clear how this is supposed to be loaded or whether it still works.

Unused Dialogue

System Messages

Apparently Sunny Day was supposed to read out the text for the game's menus, which are silent in the finished game. These files appear at the very beginning of the dialogue file along with several other unused lines below, suggesting they were moved there when this feature was cut, then forgotten about.

Players at Bat

The only thing Sunny Day says when generic players are up at bat in Baseball '97 is 'steps up to bat', but she has unused variations that would eventually go used in the Major League licensed editions that add pros.

Color Commentary

A few of Vinnie's lines go unused. Like Sunny's lines above, these are at the very beginning of the dialogue file.

Wrong-Way Baserunning

There are several clips of Sunny and Vinnie reacting to players running around the bases the wrong way. Although this is occasionally alluded to in the game, it can never actually happen.

Sunny

Vinnie

'And a Miss'

Sunny has a few lines related to receiving a strike by 'missing'. It's possible there was originally some element of aiming the swing rather than just timing it, or these were just generic variations on the regular messages that were cut because they could be misinterpreted as implying this feature existed.

Backyard Baseball We Want A Batter House

Other

A clip of Sunny saying 'Tags her!', but for some reason it's incorrectly sampled to play at half-speed (and also with some very bad audio feedback).

Here's what it should sound like normally.

Unused Text

Subtitles

Most Humongous games have inaccessible subtitles, and this one is no exception. Unlike most games, adding 'TextOn=1' to the game's configuration file does not turn them on, making ScummVM the most practical way to see them.

Debug Output

Also like most Humongous games, this one contains a slew of console debug output. The easiest way to view it is to run the game in ScummVM and set the debug level to 0 or higher.

Dreams are born in the backyard. It’s where we hit our first big league homerun, threw our first touchdown and scored our first goal. In the backyard, there’s always two-on-two-out in the bottom of the ninth. It’s always fourth-and-goal with seconds to play. It’s always a penalty shot in extra time. Age, size and skill don’t matter in the backyard – it’s all about dreams and drive. We stand in the batter’s box wearing Trout’s uniform, with Bagwell’s stance and hit the ball like Ruth. The crowd always cheers. The backyard is where kids are always heroes. Parents are larger than life. And they both become a little closer. It’s where we find the courage to share our dreams. It’s where those dreams are always possible. It’s where we connect with our parents, our kids, one another and ourselves. The backyard is where we learn the importance of team. And work. And play. Dreams live where the turf is always green and dry: The Backyard.