Extra Inning

Also known as: Ball Park II (Japan)

Developer: Midway

Extra Inning (often mis-spelled with an "s" at the end) is a sub-par baseball game released in arcades back in 1978. If you emulate it, like in the picture with this review, it looks pretty dull and bland, with a black background and white everything else. If you play this on an actual arcade cabinet, though, you'll get a slightly nicer look. The white players, ball, bases, etc. are all still there, however the black background that you see in emulation is replaced with a static background of a color baseball field. This is done by using a mirror to project the screen onto a colored background. It's a nice look if you're playing on an actual cabinet…but rather boring if you're emulating this at home. Anyway, Extra Inning, like the name implies, is a sequel. Known as Ball Park II in Japan, this is the sequel to the 1976 baseball game, Tornado Baseball (known as Ball Park in Japan). And while the actual arcade cabinet looks quite a bit nicer than the Tornado Baseball arcade cabinet did, that's really the only noticeable improvement over the original game that I could find. The name "Extra Inning" makes me feel like this was basically just a continuation of Tornado Baseball in a fancy new cabinet. Honestly, the only improvement I found was the display at the bottom of the screen. With Tornado Baseball, the numbers are labeled on the background that the graphics are projected onto. In Extra Innings, the background no longer has that information and it tells you everything right on the screen - which is nice if you're emulating the game rather than playing on an actual cabinet. Anyway, if you've played Tornado Baseball and found it to be so-so, there's nothing here that'll win you over. This is an extra inning of baseball that wasn't really needed.

Review added: 11/06/2025