Luckily, there’s now a demo version, which I played for a while last night. As expected, it’s rather unexciting. It’s better, don’t get me wrong. The graphics are nicer, I like choosing a goal at the start of a season and it’s good to have touchscreen menus. It just doesn’t quite feel different enough. As soon as they drop the price I’ll probably jump on it, but for now I’ll stick with the 2009 version, unless further play of the demo brings out any hidden depths.

There’s no way on earth my popularity is going to be high enough to let me continue to play after the end of the tenth season, so I’ll probably just delete my player and start again. I suppose it’s possible I may play some actual full games of baseball sometime, but I just love this mode so much that I never seem to want to.

The trouble is, I’m not able to build stats a lot of the time because I have to waste training time by going on dates to raise my morale. You see, your morale is based on your team’s performance – and my team, the Dragons, are doing incredibly badly this season, sitting one place off the bottom of the league with only four games to go. It’s a problem – I can’t be a great player in this team right now, but I can’t change teams either. Loyalty’s a bitch.

No, the loss and woe came when I hit my first home run. Yes, in four seasons I’d not hit a homer, but then near the beginning of the fifth season I sent the ball sailing out of the park. Unfortunately, in my rush to try and take a screenshot I managed to quit the game – and the game only saves at the end of each game. So when I restarted the game my home run was lost. I’ve not scored another one since. Sigh.

There’s a screenshot I did manage to take. I suppose it’s quite exciting in its way. Will the ball be caught? Will I reach base safely?

It’s still not as exciting as a picture of a home run would have been, though.

The fourth season was a disaster. My batting average fell from a bad .278 to a pitiful .261. My team kept losing, which meant my morale plummeted, so instead of going out and training in my time off I had to go on dates to try and improve my mood.

However, every date failed, so my morale stayed at about zero for most of the season and my performance on the field suffered accordingly.

That nightmare season is over now, though, and morale resets at the start of each season so I’m hoping for better in my fifth season. I really wish I could get my popularity up, though. To extend your career past its tenth season you need a popularity rating of over six hundred, I think, and mine’s only about 140. Not good at all.

I’ve set myself up as a batter on the Dragons. I’m not doing too well so far. The screenshot below shows how I’m doing most of the time.

I am getting better, though. Partly due to training to raise my stats (when I’m not using my spare time to go on dates to recover morale), partly due to getting better at the game and partly because of the lucky purple helmet that I spent an entire year’s salary on. Sometimes I’m even getting screens like the one below after a game.

But not very often.

So that basically left with me two contenders – Baseball Superstar and 9 Innings: Pro Baseball, both of which have fairly generous Lite versions available. First off, I tried Baseball Superstars Lite.

It’s a fast and furious arcade baseball game, with super-deformed players, non-human super players and some RPG elements. It also runs at an incredibly fast pace. I enjoyed it very much indeed – especially the part where you create a player, play as only him and then go on dates and train up between games. Very promising indeed, though in all the time I spent playing over the weekend, which was a lot, I never worked out how to play as my super players.