Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby is a 2007 Japanese Flash baseball video game published at the Disney website. The player controls Pooh in order to defeat his eight friends in a baseball's home run challenge. The game won a cult following in early 2013 and became a viral hit due to its extreme difficulty.
The brutal difficulty, thanks to the Internet, has led to the common interpretation that all of the pitchers are either sadistic assholes or supernatural beings comprised of pure evil. This is especially true with the final pitcher, Christopher Robin himself. The Darth Wiki version of this page is an example of how the setting is exaggerated into a Cosmic Horror Story.
On July 4, 2019, it was announced that the Flash game will be officially discontinued in December 2020, which is the same time that Adobe Flash itself will be discontinued.
Disney released the official English version here
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This game provides examples of:
- Anti-Frustration Features: All stages stay available upon unlocking, allowing you to challenge the same characters you lost to right away. This also makes it easier to grind up bonus points to upgrade your stats if you're having trouble with a particular opponent.
- Bizarre and Improbable Ballistics: With baseballs, not bullets. Rabbit's and Owl's pitches move in a blatantly physically impossible way, with Rabbit's pitches moving slowly and then speeding up, and Owl's pitches moving in a zigzagging manner. And yet, even they have nothing on Tigger's pitches, which in midflight become invisible. And then there's Christopher Robin, who has each of the others' pitches including all of the above.
- The Cameo: While on the overhead view, you can see Gopher as an umpire.
- Fake Difficulty: Tigger's balls turn invisible in mid-air, meaning you have to mostly rely on luck to score a precise hit on them.
- Final Boss: Christopher Robin, who perhaps borders on True Final Boss due to being in the Special stage.
- Final-Exam Boss: Christopher Robin uses ball patterns taken from the previous bosses.
- Marathon Level: Winning a level requires hitting dozens of balls. And you must sit through the rest of the pitches even if the level becomes unwinnable. Presumably, this is so the player can use the rest of the time to grind up bonus points; however, if there's nothing left to spend points on, then...
- Serial Escalation: Each opponent is more difficult than the previous, with more and more difficult pitch patterns and styles.
- Wake-Up Call Boss:
- Piglet might not have the erratic pitches of the later opponents, but he throws his balls much faster than Eeyore or Lumpy do.
- Kanga and Roo are the first to throw physics-bending pitches, unlike the first three opponents who throw simple fastballs.
- Rabbit as well; prior opponents could be beaten with more misses than hits, but Rabbit's requirements are half-and-half. You have to hit 15 home-runs, and you can only miss 15 times. After Rabbit, the rest of the bosses all require more home runs than misses.
