Reviews / previews
Microsoft Baseball 2001 represents a career move for this series. This previously action-dominated game has received a sensible infusion of simulation with the incorporation of technology from the Baseball Mogul line.
But BB2001 still feels unfinished--more like a step in the right direction than a destination.
It's not a bad game. I love the music and sound effects, some of the camera work, the little arm pump that my pitchers make when they strike somebody out, and particularly, the batter/pitcher face-off. The interface is simple, the aiming of the bat feels realistic--even though, on the surface, the mechanism isn't--and the flight and roll of a hit ball looks like the natural consequence of a real connection with it.
Moreover, the use of elements from Infinite Monkey Systems' business-oriented Mogul line means you can administer a team's budget, develop a farm system, sign and trade players and track them as they progress through their careers. This gives it some sense of weight and depth--a quality this series previously lacked.
However, my minor leaguers didn't accumulate any stats, which made it hard to judge whether they deserved to be sent up to The Show. The trade screen doesn't present enough information to allow you to evaluate a deal without jumping to individual team rosters. Why the abstraction of "revenue points" instead of money for the team finances? You can't draft a league from scratch. And the designers have left out one of Baseball Mogul's most appealing innovations: the news stories that capture each game's key events.
On the action side, the game seems to fall into predictable lines. (I've yet to see an infield hit or a wild pitch.) Throwing errors have been included, but I wish they'd take some of them out. They're all over the place. The AI does some flaky things, like allowing Toronto starter David Wells to pitch through the 10th inning and holding runners at first on balls that always manage to roll to the outfield wall.
After a hit by your opponent, the game occasionally jumps to a shot of the outfield with the hit ball nowhere in sight.
There's no online play. The animation's a bit wooden. The instant-replay generator is infatuated with double plays, but has yet to show me a homer. And while my Red Sox made five errors in one game and Nomar Garciaparra hit three homers (two of them grand slams) in another, you'd never know it from listening to the announcer.
Microsoft is doing significant things right here--but not consistently enough to make Baseball 2001 a winner. It hasn't scored yet. But at least it's running, and that's a good sign.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro
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