Bad News Baseball (1990, NES) by Tecmo

Current Any% Leaderboard (speedrun.com)

This game couldn’t have been drawn at a better time.

The Trials are chock-full of difficult games, bad games, and games I did NOT want to play.  Games like Dirty Harry, Final Fight Streetwise, and Dick Tracy took dozens of hours just to be able to complete, let alone speedrun.  But when this game came up, I knew it would be easy…

…right?

Well, thanks to Arcus, xChristine, and FlannelKat, I was able to figure out Schaaa’s manip, and that saved me from hours of RNG grinding.  Bad News Baseball is a port of a Japanese baseball game, with a cutesy twist: umpires are bunnies, you can play as girls (sadly, the manip does not work with that), and there’s lots of colorful animations and catchy tunes.  This is a solid, if not good, baseball game for the NES, and Tecmo did a good thing here.

The RNG manip you need to do to succeed begins with hitting start on a specific audio note.  Then, you follow a VERY specific list of input instructions.  It’s honestly not terribly hard; anyone can learn this run.  However, it’s still a lot to do, and you have very little time to do the inputs, so this is not completely free and easy.  But if you’re looking for a simple speedrun of a sports game that is NOT banging your head against an RNG wall for hours and hours, this is a good place to look.