World Series Baseball

The pitcher winds up, the batter grits his teeth, and the whole stadium holds its breath - World Series Baseball brings America's national pastime to the Game Gear's pocket screen in a form that can win over even players who don't fully understand baseball. This game proves that even a small display can conjure up the tension of a big match.

At its core it's a baseball sports simulation, where you alternate between offense and defense. At bat you wait for the right pitch and try to hit the ball as far as possible; in the field you control the pitcher, catch hits and run between bases to stop your opponent from scoring. The game is built on tactical role-switching and gradually building a lead across individual innings, which makes it a title that rewards patience and awareness.

World Series Baseball was released under the SEGA label and followed a series of baseball games aimed at recreating the sport as faithfully as possible. On the color handheld Game Gear, SEGA's answer to the monochrome Game Boy, the title enjoyed the advantage of full-color display - on a portable console from the first half of the nineties, that was no small edge.

The Game Gear positioned itself as a technically more advanced handheld than the competition, and sports titles like this one were exactly the kind of games that showed off its color screen. World Series Baseball offered a portable serving of America's pastime for players who wanted to enjoy the sport anywhere and anytime - albeit at the cost of the notoriously fast battery drain the Game Gear was famous for.

Culturally the title fits into the broader wave of sports games with which both SEGA and Nintendo tried to reach American audiences in the early nineties. Baseball, as one of the most popular sports in the USA, was a logical choice, and the portable version expanded where and how you could play it.

Why play: For a color pocket serving of American baseball that shows what the Game Gear's screen could do against its monochrome rivals.