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Batter Up! |
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Batter Up! |
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| This is definately another one of those
gimmicky accessories released for the SNES, which offhand is a good idea in theory, but
just doesn't work in the real world. The Batter Up!, made by Sport Sciences, is a baseball
bat controller which is for use with any baseball game. This device sounds like a clever
idea, but it never caught on. You swing the Batter Up! bat to control your on-screen
character's swing, sort of a virtual reality type thing. Honestly, though, I have no idea
how it works. I assume the device senses your swing and creates a composite of a standard
controller motion; since virtually all baseball games use a similar controller scheme for
batting, this makes sense. The bat is black plastic, most of which is covered with light blue plastic foam on the ends. The bat is about four feet long, with a solid black plastic middle about a foot long, which appears to have various buttons and a directional control on it (you can sort of see them in the controls picture above), as well as four dip switches. Presumably, this is so you can position your batter in the batter's box and field and stuff without having to reattach a standard SNES controller. Specifics on this device have been hard to come by, so if you have one of these, please contact me and tell me more about it. Incidentally, there are also versions of this controller for the Genesis and the PC. This is licensed by Nintendo, and comes in the trademark SNES style red and black box. From what I have read, Sport Sciences went out of business less than two years after this was released. Their old domain, sports-sci.com no longer works. Sources: DogP, Brad Van Zee bpvanzee@ls.wustl.edu, EGM #54, Jared (lukas@westworld.com) |
