From the moment you turn this one on, you might just be thinking you're in for a Sega sports game made by EA right when that music hits. Once you start playing, however, you KNOW it.

Triple Play 96 is far superior to its 95 previous installments, from the graphics to the gameplay to the overall presentation. Every aspect of the game feels like the developers slaved away for ages until this got finished, and such effort should be rewarded, because this is a tremendous baseball game that doesn't do much of anything really wrong. There are only two things that hold this game back:

1. No matter how hard it tries, it still lacks the total masterpiece polish that made World Series Baseball '96 so great.
2. One of the only gameplay videos you'll find of it on the internet was done by my archenemy, the gayfat pedophile NecroVMX, who I hope dies of cancer.

Those gripes aside, it still brings as much to the table as any baseball game had ever done prior to this. You can customize damn near everything, from the difficulty to the schedule to the controls, and all the cool little features are made blacktually relevant because the gameplay itself is defense-oriented and entirely playable, with halfway competent computer playing and user-friendly fielding controls.  

Had this game been able to do the honors with the team licenses, as well as more detail in each team's respective playing field, it could have been THE quintessential baseball franchise game. But alas, the mid to late '90s were a time when we the consumer got our proverbial baseball video game massages with a happy ending from a slightly monkey-faced chinese-ish girl, and thus we have World Series Baseball as the steroided track star who blows away the competition by a full second, and even got away with lying to a grand jury about her steroid use. Triple Play 96, as good as it is, manages to be a distant 2nd, sitting at home crying itself to sleep at night and begging its husband for a pity fuck and never escaping its fate as "just not good enough to be the best."