Jaleco Sports Bases Loaded 2 review: The roots of good baseball

Jaleco Sports Bases Loaded 2 review: The roots of good baseball

This is every version of Bases Loaded 2, and they still come out swinging.

The Bases Loaded 2 games were competent and groundbreaking for their time, bringing some much needed balance adjustments, features and visual improvements over their predecessors. And while this is still a collection of just this game in all its forms, with a few additions Rock It! Games has faithfully modernized these classics.

The collection includes five versions of the game, from its MUCH improved Second Season NES version all the way through its Super NES iteration, and even the international flavors. In my youth I only ever played Super Bases Loaded 2, which had some fantastic concepts, including a Mode 7 first person view for balls in play and the options to customize a team and host an all star game. Even today it has some fun pitching and batting mechanics, and the ability to make a team and ratcheting up their stats to the max makes for fun, OP experience. Hell, classic baseball games of the 8- and 16-bit era were always going to be more arcade than realistic, so why not actually have fun with that?

The NES game finally added a full season and real on-field plays. It drastically improved animations and gameplay from the original Bases Loaded, and yet it’s still not that good of a game, at least compared to what else was out at the time. Second Season really only existed because kids hadn’t picked up a Super NES yet to play the real game, but they do at least have some fun with the teams, designing them around Hollywood stars and non-athlete famous folk.

The other three games are the Japanese and Korean versions, and the collection even includes those games’ instruction booklets as well (if you can read in other languages).

So while the games are all there, what I’ve really come to enjoy are the new quality of life touches. I mentioned how I enjoyed just wrecking teams during games, and now that’s even easier with the ability to rewind the game like a VHS tape until our pitches land or our bats hit the ball correctly, leading to constant no-hitters and mercy score wins. It feels goooooood. It looks good, too, with the new CRT filter and the frames we can select from. There are also built-in achievements this time for both games; the first game was a bit of a novelty to own, but now there are goals to keep us actually coming back with stuff to do. And, coincidentally, playing as much as I did was more than I thought I would, so much so that I found myself climbing to the top of the new online global leaderboards that the games utilize.

For fans of the Bases Loaded series, this collection serves up a quality way to not only replay the original games but also to find something new to dip into. The developers know exactly what we’re looking from the experience, and have delivered a quality project that surpasses the source material.

This review is based on a Switch code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. Images and video courtesy publisher. The video first appeared on The SideQuest for April 2, 2026.