Kyūkai Dōchūki

Kyukai Dochuki (球界道中記, Kyūkai Dōchūki, lit. Baseball World Traveler’s Journal) is a baseball arcade game that was released by Namco in 1990 only in Japan; it runs on Namco System 2 hardware, and is a spin-off of Yokai Dochuki (Namco’s first 16-bit arcade game). The gameplay is similar to that for Namco’s own World Stadium series – except that both players have a total of thirty-six different teams to choose from in the Japanese (the teams in the league are also identical to those from the Namco System 1-era WS games), Arabic, German, Humbaba, American, Russian, and Chinese leagues. The Japan League has five stadiums, and if the first player selects one team from it, it will randomly decide which one the match will take place in (it also randomly decides which of the players bats first); however, the other leagues only have one stadium (and the one of the Chinese League has a portrait of Chairman Mao over its scoreboard). This game also features a cameo re-appearance, from Valkyrie (as in no Densetsu), who appears to report the final outcome of a match once it has finished, and Namco’s signature character Pac-Man can also be seen on two of the television screens in her studio wearing a purple bow tie (in his Pac-Land-style anthropomorphized form, as opposed to his “original” one).