Collection essentials #408: Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest (N64)

This one’s a nostalgia pick!

This is the fourth and final “Ken Griffey Jr.” baseball game developed for Nintendo consoles and published by Nintendo (who at the time owned the Seattle Mariners baseball team), though actual development of the games was done by other companies. 

Compared to other baseball games at the time, this one focused a little less on realism and more on delivering fast-paced action, often referred to as more “arcade style”. It has the  basic modes you’d expect from a baseball game of this era, such as the ability to play a season (with a full 162 games or something shorter) and a Home Run Derby mode. There’s also a “create-a-player” feature which lets you do exactly what its name suggests. You can name your created players and change their appearance to an extent as well as their batting stance, and then you are given a limited number of attribute points to designate their on-the-field skills. There is, not surprisingly, a cheat code that removes the limit, basically letting you create a perfect player.

In terms of actual gameplay, batting is a little different than in your typical 3D baseball game, under the default settings anyway. There’s an actual crosshair on the screen that the batting player can move around, as well as a square representing where the pitcher is aiming. The batter must try and line up this crosshair with wherever the box is, and the pitcher can move until the end of the windup just before throwing the ball. The better at hitting the current player is, the bigger the crosshair will be, so great hitters like Tony Gwynn will have a rather large crosshair.

In terms of presentation, the game does not have play-by-play announcing which eventually became the expected norm for baseball video games. Instead, you hear the PA announcer give the names of each player who comes to bat as well as announcing pitcher changes and injuries. Occasionally there will be a quip made by real-life Mariners TV announcer Dave Niehaus or Ken Griffey Jr. himself commenting on a play that just happened.

One neat thing is that, when creating a player, if the game recognizes the first and/or last names that you use, the announcer will properly call out their name when they come to the plate. You can mix and match first and last names of real major league players (as well as some people on the development team) and get some pretty amusing results with this. This means the announcer will properly call out names such as “Rich Person”, “Chili Snow”, “Charlie Brown”, “Richard Nixon”, and many more. If you use two last names for your player instead of a first and last name, such as “Green Yoshii”, the announcer will still call it out, but it will sound just a bit unnatural.

I got this game in 2001 for my 11th birthday, from my friends Dan and Andy. I have a home movie of that birthday party with me opening the gift. The cartridge and manual shown in the photo are the same ones that I got on that day, but sadly I did not keep the box. 

This was the first 3D baseball game I ever owned, and I played it to death. I’m pretty sure I played two full seasons of it and became extremely familiar with the game and how it works. I can’t remember if this is the case on higher difficulties, but I learned that the way you pitch to the computer doesn’t matter all that much because they seemingly will arbitrarily decide whether they hit the ball and how well. You can “charge up” your pitches by holding down the button longer, using up more of your pitcher’s stamina, but I discovered that it makes no difference against the computer, so I always threw the lightest pitches possible and never ever had to use relief pitchers because my starters would never get tired.

I used to love finding ways to exploit or break the game. I knew exactly how and when to steal bases and did it all the time. Whenever I had runners at first base and third base, I knew exactly how to distract the computer and get the runner at first up to second base every time, without fail. I discovered that stealing home in this game is simply not a thing, and if you do it successfully, the runner simply disappears with no run or out being recorded! I also found out that if you play with a team of perfect players against the computer on the lowest difficulty setting, it’s almost impossible for them to ever get you out, and so I had to play a game of just to see how high I could run up the score (I think it capped at 99 but I’m not positive). 

Is Ken Griffey Jr.’s Slugfest worth trying out today if you don’t have nostalgia for it like me? Probably not, honestly. It wouldn’t be on my list otherwise. But I sure got many hours of fun with it, and for being one of my most-played late childhood games, it earned its spot on my essentials list.