Backyard Baseball (PC)

Backyard Baseball is the very first game in Humongous Entertainment's Junior Sports line, the only series that survived its takeover by Atari. Thirty kids get together and play baseball, occasionally in their backyards, and may or may not join the Backyard Baseball League and win the Ultra Grand Championship of the Universe.

In truth, the game isn't that fun. It suffers from Humongous Entertainment Arcade Syndrome – it has too many levels with too little variation in gameplay, and even for a children's game it's excessively repetitive. What really holds the game together, however, is its cast of characters: a bunch of very funny and well-written kids with fitting, memorable theme songs. Some of them were so good they even survived to the later 3D games, though they got beaten pretty badly with the redesign stick.

Unused Subtitles
Most Humongous games have inaccessible subtitles, and Backyard Baseball is no exception. However, unlike other games, the code "TextOn=1" does not turn them on. The only way to see them is to use ScummVM.

Unused Graphics
Rooms 16 and 19 consist of nothing but a yellow background with very faint hand-drawn text reading "Stupid talkies." (The text is more visible if you view the image at its original size by clicking on the thumbnail at left.) Probably referring to testing character voices. These rooms can be accessed by activating ScummVM's debug console (Ctrl-D) and entering the command "room 16" or "room 19."

Camera Debug Remnants
Warping to Room 6 using ScummVM (with the command "room 6") brings up a black screen with a curious menu. According to the labels in the top right, it is used to adjust the camera angle and position. Since the game has no scrolling, the "camera" here is most likely the view used for the "Humongous Vision" instant replay screen. What's odd is that the camera has a Z component, which shouldn't be necessary because the instant replay is just a zoom-in on the 2D field. It's not clear if there is a way to make this screen function properly.

Unused Dialogue
The game helpfully places a slew of unused lines right at the beginning of its dialogue file (BASEBALL.HE2). These voice clips (patched together from 17 separate clips) consist of Sunny Day reading out various system messages, such as "Are you sure you want to quit the game?" and "Do you want to save the game?" The actual game just uses text.

These three lines from Vinnie the Gooch follow directly after the ones above and give some advice to the player. Interestingly, some of it doesn't seem to be true; no matter how often a kid throws the same pitch, the opponent is just as likely to hit it.

A series of lines from Sunny and Vinnie reacting to a player running around the bases the wrong way. This can never happen.

Three lines spoken by Sunny if you supposedly missed a ball. There is no way to aim the bat in this game, so this is impossible.