Collection essentials #56: Dusty Diamond’s All-Star Softball (NES)

This isn’t a big, trailblazing, historic or even well-known game like some of the others you’ve been seeing, but it stands out to me as one of the coolest and best sports games on the NES on a system that’s loaded with them. Unlike most sports games, you don’t simply pick a team of players. Instead, you draft your team from a large roster of quirky characters. All the draftable characters have different attributes, and some have special abilities like being able to dodge tags while running the bases. There are even different ball fields that have quirks to them, such as a school yard where you can make an out instead of a home run if a ball breaks a school window. The gameplay itself is nice and smooth too so the game thankfully doesn’t just rely on gimmicks. A small issue is that the game itself doesn’t tell you any of the players’ attributes when you’re drafting them, just their names and faces. But all you need is the internet to either look up a guide or a scan of the game’s instruction manual and you’ll be okay. This is one of those games I really wish I had owned when I was a kid!