First Mario Strikers and now Baseball: Nintendo is keeping alive those franchises that punctuated the death throes of the GameCube, while the Tennis and Golf the fans truly hanker for go unannounced. That said, Baseball does remain the firm’s most in-depth take on a sport.

With a well-stocked character roster, the emphasis is on strategically balancing your team. There are few all-rounders, forcing you to take a hit in certain disciplines if you’re to excel in others, in turn leading to the creation of teams that feel like their own entities and not the re-skinned models we’ve come to expect from these games. Add in specific character quirks – stats are boosted when natural pals are allied – and the often simplistic pick-up-and-play angle is further removed.

A difficulty curve stemming from multiple control schemes is less intentional. As with Smash Bros, Baseball crows about its generous selection of options, but fails to provide any that truly satisfies. The Wii Sports baseball set-up has been curiously jettisoned for something more akin to We Love Golf, minor gestures replacing button presses. That the Remote needn’t mimic any form of recognisable swing or pitch detaches you even further than a clinical button press. And turning the Remote like a NES pad leaves you negotiating 3D space with the D-pad – clunky as ever – while adding the Nunchuck’s stick simply reminds you how little we’ve travelled since the GameCube.

However, unlike in Mario Strikers – against which similar criticism is levelled – a great deal of in-house polish has gone into dressing up the sport at the game’s core. There’s a diverting RPG-lite quest that sees Mario pulling off baseball-related feats to recruit new characters into his team, while the previously mentioned uber-roster gives multiplayer (mysteriously local-only) great mileage. Like the leftover Beatles, it may not be a favourite, but it can still knock them out of the park.

Verdict: 6/10