Reviews / previews
The players in Interplay's Baseball Edition 2000 look
so good they're kind of scary. You can watch their
muscles flex as they stretch the bat behind their
head, warming up for their swing. Their jerseys shift
as they twist their
torsos and their
head scratches are
believable. (I didn't
notice any other
kind of scratching
going on, but I'm
sure that would have
looked real as well.)
You can lay a lot of
this realism at the
door of the Messiah
technology licensed from Shiny Entertainment. As in
Interplay's previous baseball game, VR Baseball
2000, this polygon-scaling technology allows coders
to make the game as detailed as it can be on a given
system.
Then again, it's weird that in a baseball game with
over 700 animations, the one for the batter hitting the
ball is poorly executed. Every swing, whether a
grounder to third or a pop fly, looks like a bunt. And
while each player is painstakingly rendered
in true-to-life detail, all their swings look
identical.
Unfortunately, a lot of these "then agains"
turn up in Baseball Edition 2000.
For instance, the varying levels of difficulty
are generally well implemented. "Rookie"
makes it a cinch to pick up batting and
fielding, Pro takes a respectable step up (you'll have to control the direction of
your swing as well as the timing), and All-Star has the balls flying at you
faster than you can blink.
But, then again, you have no way of knowing where a pitch may be headed
other than eyeballing it.
The players do look real, as do the 3D
modeled stadiums--all 30, plus Seattle's new
Safeco Field and seven hidden stadiums
from the say-hey-days of baseball--and their
animated crowds. Apart from the swinging
animation, it's fun to watch the players'
unique routines as they approach the plate,
stretching and spitting before their at-bat.
Then again, you need a 3D card to even run
the game.
The sounds are a mixed bag. The crowd is great, heckling players they don't
like and cheering heavily for plays they do. Then again, the PA announcer was
barely audible, even after I turned the individual volume setting all the way up
(although we had no problem hearing the generic play-by-play calls).
We had two installation choices: an 80MB minimum or a 650MB full. The CD
crashed every time we tried to install the whole banana, so we made do with
the minimum. The game played fine at first. But around the third inning, it
started to slow way down any time more than a couple players were in
motion. It made it a lot easier to hit the ball as it drifted to the plate like the
one in that Intel commercial, but it was
tough to field.
The game does feature a lot of creative
extras, including a tournament mode in
which players can draft their own all-star
team and create a player to see how your
guy stacks up against the pro--both in
games and in the leader board in the Home
Run Derby.
But, then again, these extras--and the
realistically reproduced players and
stadiums--can't keep Baseball Edition 2000 from being more than a minor
league hit.-- Joel Strauch / GamePro
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