Backyard Baseball Twins

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Ascended Fanon: At the beginning of the series, Pablo was just a normal (though often overpowered) character. When the programmers found out about his Memetic Badass status, they put a huge stained glass window of him in Backyard Skateboarding.
Bad Export for You: Backyard Soccer: MLS Edition and Backyard Basketball 2004 were released in Europe, with all the pros removed.
Cash Cow Franchise: This franchise was the cause of Humongous Entertainment making a profit. It seemed to evolve further into this as soon as Atari hijacked the series, but it later lost this status as the quality of the games went down and the series lost relevancy.

Creator Backlash: Most of the former Humongous employees detest the later games in the series, if the Humongous Alumni page on Facebook is anything to go by. One of the former artists even responded to Evergreen's revival announcement with 'This just made me throw up in my mouth a little. Nice to see them flogging that dead horse.'
Cross-Dressing Voices: Most boys are voiced by women.
Executive Meddling: A positive example - after Backyard Baseball didn't perform well in its first year, everyone at Humongous was convinced not to make any more games, but Ron Gilbert pushed them forward. And surprise surprise, they ended up outselling their already popular Junior Adventures. It got worse when Atari took over, however.
Franchise Zombie: The 2007 titles onward (Continuity Reboot and on) are pretty unanimously considered this, as they were all made following the bankruptcy and closure of the original Humongous Entertainment studios. This is the point where the series slowly devolved into a major sports league cash cow, with a pretty obvious lack of care for the quality of the games.

Keep Circulating the Tapes: Evergreen, the current rights holder of the series, has gone on record stating a re-release of any of the older games is heavily unlikely due to rights issues with the pro players (this wouldn't affect the original Baseball and Soccer, however, since they didn't feature any pros to begin with). ^note This means the only way to play any of the old games at this point is to buy them secondhand or obtain them through... other means. However, in April 2019, the official Humongous Twittertweeted this image of the original Junior Sports logo.

Magnum Opus Dissonance: Humongous had no intention of this series outselling their Junior Adventures, especially since Backyard Baseball performed poorly in its first year.
Mythology Gag: Pablo's Easter Egg (where if you hold shift and click on him, he reveals that he doesn't actually speak Spanish) is actually a nod to his voice actor; the development team was unable to find a suitable authentic Latino voice actor, so they simply took the auditioner who sounded closest to such. His only experience in Spanish-speaking was learning it in classes, as he was actually non-native. The dialogue was actually thrown in as a joke to poke fun at this; see this article for more information.
The Other Darrin: The series has had many different voice casts. The voices that most people are familiar with, and what's considered the definitive voice cast of the series, are the 1997-2001 voices with Jen Taylor as Sunny Day. For Baseball 2003 and Soccer 2004, the recording moved to San Diego with the Audio Godz voices, including Lani Minella as most of the announcers alongside some other big names such as Ryan Drummond. 2003-2005 moved back to Seattle, but with a totally new cast (except Dex Manley), including Samantha Kelly as Sunny Day. 2006 onward brings back a few more of the classic voices, such as Mark Lund, Dolores Rogers and Shelley Reynolds. Chuck Downfield (Clem Daniels) and Barry Dejay (Dex Manley) were the only Seattle actors who were never replaced.
Pop Culture Urban Legends: The cover athlete in Backyard Football was also stricken by bad luck during the season. In the original game, Steve Young suffered a career ending injury in the 1999 season. In 2002, Drew Bledsoe got injured and Tom Brady stepped in (and the rest is history). Jeff Garcia (2004) became a journeyman after that season, and Daunte Culpepper (2006) blew out both of his knees and wound up in the now-defunct UFL. While Brady (the 2008 cover star) guided the Patriots to a perfect regular season, they lost the Super Bowl that year.
Production Posse: A number of voice actors in the series are Sonic the Hedgehog veterans, due to it being recorded at Bill Corkery Productions, where the Sonic Adventure-era games were recorded. Notably, these include three versions of Tails (Corey and Conner Bringas and William Corkery), all of Chaotix (Bill and Emily Corkery and Marc Biagi), Lani Minella (Rouge), and even Sonic himself, Ryan Drummond.
- Additionally, many voice actors from the Super Mario Bros. series are regulars here, such as two separate versions of Princess Peach (Jen Taylor and Samantha Kelly, both of whom have also voiced Toad and Toadette), Dolores Rogers (Bowser Jr.), and Dex Manley (Lakitu prior toMario Kart 7 and the announcer for Mario Golf).
Talking to Herself: Lani Minella plays both announcers in Baseball 2003 and Soccer 2004.
What Could Have Been:
- Basketball 's credits list the people who programmed an online mode, suggesting that it would have had online play. Football 2002 also has a screenshot in the help files that replaces 'Network' with 'On-line', suggesting it was supposed to be this instead of LAN.
- Peyton Manning was going to be one of the playable pros in Football 2002, but he was removed before the game was released.
- A network mode was planned as early as the very first game in the series. One of the pitches for the original game went into a little detail about this, and even mentioned a possibility of being able to spectate an in-progress network game. This idea was ultimately dropped for the final product likely due to the high development costs and complexity of adding such a mode that wasn't likely to be used very often, especially since one of the target audiences for these games was families who had budget computer setups.
- According to some data in the game files, a console port of Backyard Skateboarding was being planned during development.
Write Who You Know: The Backyard Kids ran on this. Nearly all of them were based on kids the developers grew up knowing — in fact, the entire purpose of the game was that they were meant to represent the kind of kids that you would know in the neighborhood. To top it all off, many of the stories you can listen to from their player cards were actual stories from the staff themselves, or from people the staff knew.

Batting Cage Nets Batting Cage Backyard Twins Baseball Baseball Players Backyard Baseball Fantasy Baseball Baseball Training Baseball Equipment 30x12x10 Batting Cage Net and Frame Corner Kit30' long - 12' Wide - 10' HighThis listing supplies everything you need to create your own backyard battin. This, my friends, is Backyard Baseball. Backyard Baseball takes you back to when you were a kid, when baseball was a game, and the team was hastily put together among the kids in the neighborhood. Playing for Real. Humongous Entertainment reached back into the past and captured all those childhood memories of baseball and digitally assembled.

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Backyard Baseball

4.18 / 5 - 128 votes

Description of Backyard Baseball Windows

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Home Run Park

Imagine a game where the players play for the love of the game, not the money. A game where multi-million dollar contracts are unknown. A game where everyone gets to play. Imagine a game just like it was with the youthful innocence of a child. This, my friends, is Backyard Baseball. Backyard Baseballtakes you back to when you were a kid, when baseball was a game, and the team was hastily put together among the kids in the neighborhood.

Playing for Real

Humongous Entertainment reached back into the past and captured all those childhood memories of baseball and digitally assembled them into this game. All the details that make the memories real are here - from the kids taunting the pitcher to the child with the asthma inhaler. Do you remember picking teams, taking turns picking from the best players until only the bad players were left? Do you remember picking someone's little brother because his big brother was a good player? It's all here. Nothing was left out.

Players choose from fields such as the sandlot, the urban parking lot, and the rich kid's backyard. Pitchers throw crazy pitches such as the 'Elevator' and the 'Crazy Ball.' Background ambient noises and the taunting by the opposing team add to the rich atmosphere that you can almost smell.

Everything about this game is charming and cute.

Swing and Miss

Gameplay includes all the necessary elements. Pitchers choose the pitch as well as the placement. Hitters swing at the ball and can even see the strike zone. Fielding is accomplished by clicking where you want the ball thrown, and running is as simple as clicking in the direction you want the runner to advance. Everything is here, and everything is easy enough for kids. The pace is a little slow, but not too fast for children. Each batter has a distinct personality - from the boy who hops to the plate to the girl who says 'my game is really tennis, anyway' when she strikes out. I was extremely impressed with all the details of each character.

I have a few complaints about the game. This game doesn't install any files to the hard disk - everything is run from the CD. For some reason, each swing of the bat causes the CD to be read. This makes the animation choppy and the mouse click to hit feels sluggish and unresponsive. While the game is playable with this problem, it makes hitting the ball a little difficult. Instead of getting better the more balls I hit, I never really improved. I think this is because I never was able to time when I hit the mouse button and the player started their swing. That little delay when it read from the CD just ruins the hand/eye coordination.

I tried copying the entire 270MB of CD data to the hard disk to see if that improved performance (note: this is not an option in the install menu, I just copied it by dragging the contents of the CD into a new folder on my hard disk.) It did speed up the game somewhat, but the batting problem didn't improve significantly.

I also encountered one bug: I hit a ball that bounced infield, then over the fence for what should have been a double. The announcer even stated this was a double, but the runner advanced only to first.

Worthy of Praise

This game is terrific and has all the elements of a Gold Medal winner. But I can't do it. The delay in clicking the mouse and the batter swinging the ball just ruins it for me. I still like the game a lot and highly recommend it, but a Gold Medal is for games without such evident flaws. I guess I'm mad because this should have been corrected. Even a little play testing would have shown that this was a problem. Instead, we are left with what could have been a 'Game of the Year,' but instead fails to deliver on one very important game element.

This is still an outstanding game and I recommend it strongly.

Review By GamesDomain

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Captures and Snapshots

Screenshots from MobyGames.com

Comments and reviews

jjawwechampein2019-10-242 points

i like this game because it has cominsens

faggy fag fag2019-09-241 point

i acually really enjoybthis game

curry2019-07-221 point

I like it

bigrickjohson.1.2019-04-291 point

i like pickles

im dum2019-04-27-6 points

how do u download again xD

Cascadianranger2019-02-246 points

For those wondering what to do after downloading, extract the files anyhwere into your C drive (even their own folder) and then add the files through ScummVM and use that to play

derp2018-12-22-1 point

does this require a cd?

Catbug2018-12-120 point

I agree with wonderwoman, I downloaded it but its just a zip file with a bunch of other files. What do I do now?

The Unknown2018-05-03-4 points

Read the FAQ dude. BTW I found Backyard Baseball 2003 4free on www.pcgamefreetop.net

M2018-04-27-2 points

how do i open these files?

nice gamer2018-04-080 point

hello guys but this game is so amazing and addictive game hehehe

WonderMan2018-04-075 points

I downloaded the files but now what?

yeet2018-04-051 point

hello this game is so lit i love it its so cool of fun for a family

barter2018-02-23-2 points

this game is awesome

T.J.2017-10-063 points

I love this game!

tall tyler storm2017-07-117 points

best baseball video game

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