5. Backyard Baseball 2001
Baseball has always been my favorite sport and it probably always will be. This game offered that sport in a fun and simple way for kids. It was not overly hard but my goodness was this game fun.
It had earlier versions which drew you in. The characters like Pablo Sanchez and Achmed Kahn got you hooked. these were fake players that were made specifically for the purpose of this game. Almost everyone one of them were unique in basically every way. None of them looked similar (besides the twins), they all had different batting stances, different windups and most importunately different stats.
While it was these characters that really brought the game to life it was the addiction of real MLB players that made the game even more legitimate. Bringing in the star of every major league team and in some cases two stars from each team made this even more fun. You could have a team with Pablo Sanchez and Ken Griffey Jr batting 3 and 4 respectively. Oh, and did I forget to mention that the real life MLB players were rethought of as kids?! This was amazing back in the day.
This game while simple will always be one of my favorites. It is such a classic game that lost its personality as it started to come into today’s age of gaming. Humongous entertain was a pretty big part of my life when i was a kid.