Current Events > The Forgotten Rareware hidden gem: Ken Griffey Jr's Winning Run

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Would you call Ken Griffey Jr's Winning run a hidden gem?

Well, it sold less than 500k copies. So usually below the 1 million mark would be considered "hidden". Was it a gem? You don't see any metacritic or youtube videos that take a more in depth look that "we played one exhibition game".

So let's take a look into the long forgotten game by two powerhouse game devs.

Hiroshi Yamauchi himself was producer for winning run, the president of Nintendo. Rareware hot off the heels of Donkey Kong Country was to follow up the successful KGJPMLB (ken griffey jr present major league baseball).

You are greeted with Donkey Kong Country music. Seriously, when you boot it up you don't think baseball, you immediately think DKC. It has that pure 90's feel to it with the voice samples and techno style.

Then the menu, wow, this looks better than many early N64 titles for an SNES game:

https://www.myabandonware.com/media/screenshots/k/ken-griffey-jr-s-winning-run-i6w/ken-griffey-jr-s-winning-run_2.png

Winning Run is a pick-up-and-play kind of game. Just get your teams, and deal with one or two buttons for both batting and pitching and you are ready to go! Its simple, relaxing, and addicting.

But how is it compared to the successful KGMLB? Well for 2 player games, Presents is the way to go, its faster and more steroid ridden for maximum enjoyment. Winning run is slower paced, quieter, and tries for a more realistic approach.

From the 162 season game I played back in the day I couldn't discover any major exploits, and the AI wasn't too bad. What Winning Run had going for it in single player was its RPG like trading system. As you do better with players, their "rating" goes up. Every game you can trade up to 5 players per game with another player whose rating was up to 5 higher. So this means after every game you had a little leveling up of players.

This is what I felt make Winning Run addicting compared to other baseball games. Sports games have stats going up and down. But this was more like an RPG where if you knew what you were doing, stats could only go up, something I would REALLY love to see in a fantasy-sports game that EA had dragged down with it.

All in all I recommend giving Winning Run a try, but if you are looking for a fanastic game to play with your buddies, best stick with Ken Griffey presents MLB ;)

I have it. Only real exploit is first game is played by mariners. The value increase is based on batting average, though it has to be below 1.000. So if you come out and dominate first game with team average of like .750 (possible but hard) you can get a stacked team easily.

Also knuckle balls are awesome against AI.
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^ for All-Star Baseball for the N64 knuckle balls were my jam. I think Palm balls were the other one.