Attention sportsball fans, the Dreamcast’s online sports lineup has now increased by a value of one! Pro Yakyu Team de Asobou NET! is now back online thanks to Shuouma! For those of you unaware, this is part of a series of baseball games by Sega’s own Smilebit studio that has a few entries on the Dreamcast, in both arcade baseball and team management varieties. While I’ve never played the team management games due to my complete ignorance of the Japanese language, the baseball games are excellent and have really awesome vibe to them. The super-deformed characters and bright and colorful graphics give the game a really unique feel, much different from Visual Concept’s World Series Baseball games. While the game is very cartoony, it’s actually officially licensed by Nippon Professional Baseball and features real teams and rosters, which is quite cool. This particular iteration of the game features online play, as you might be able to tell by the “NET!” at the end of the title, and it actually plays impressively smooth with little to no lag or hiccups in our testing. This is extremely impressive for a baseball game. That coupled with the crazy fun gameplay, I’d easily say this is the best online baseball game the Dreamcast has to offer. Sorry World Series Baseball 2K2! That being said, unfortunately the game does seem to be very latency sensitive and tends to end games with an error if your connection to the other player isn’t rock solid. With this in mind, you’ll ideally want to find opponents that are geographically close to you for best results. Despite this, it’s an absolute blast to play and I’m sure many of you will get lots of enjoyment out of this one.
If you’d like to jump online yourself, you’ll need to be running DreamPi 2.0 and you’ll need a unique “Login ID” in your web browser settings as this will be used as your account name when playing online. If you still have your ID set to “dream”, you won’t be able to connect to the server. It also should be noted that this game is the opposite of many other online games in that it requires you to disable DMZ on your router if you have it enabled. If you don’t, it will freeze in the online lobby. If you just manually forward ports for the other games, this isn’t a problem. As always, be sure to check the Connection Guide for all the info you need on how to connect.
If you have any issues with the server, feel free to report them in the comments below. Many thanks to Shuouma for adding this awesome new baseball game to the online roster! Play ball!