Acclaim Moves Up to Plate

All-Star Baseball 2000, coming from Acclaim, is due out this April for the Nintendo 64. Based on the same engine as ASB '99, ASB 2000 will improve on its predecessor in a number of areas, as well as add a few completely new features.

Among the first of the new features is what Acclaim is calling 3D batting - basically there's a new targeting icon for batting, which helps you better position the bat and control where the ball goes. Additionally, more than 100 new batting stances have been added. Among them are Mark McGuire's, Andres Gallaraga's, and Jeff Bagwell's.

On the opposite end is pitch control - you can now control the speed of your pitches. If you tap on the button, the pitch will be thrown at maximum speed. Hold a little and it slows down a little. Hold a lot and it slows down even more. And in terms of stats, ASB 2000 will keep track of which batters have hit which pitches for you.

Responding to complaints that player animations - particularly throwing and running animations - were dull and repetitious, the development team has added several new animations - over 400 in fact. They include over-the-shoulder catches, breaking up double plays, hook slides, and swipe tags. Also you'll find head tracking, fielding errors, better catch animations, better bat swings, and strikeout reactions from the pitcher. Plus you can now pull an evasive slide - slide above or below the tag.

Like the latest series of Acclaim titles, ASB 2000 will use the expansion pack, but it will run in hi-res without it - the main difference being that with the expansion pack, the newly added replay mode will run much longer than it will in plain old hi-res. The graphics are looking really good, and a number of nice touches have been added: Players wear sunglasses when appropriate and have socks and alternate team jerseys.

The AI has been tweaked as well - the fantasy player draft is purportedly much better now - and the trade logic has been improved. You can now create a whole team, as the create-a-player function has been expanded to allow you to dream up 25 players.

All the major league teams and stadiums are in place - even the new Mariners stadium. And scouting reports are being done by Derek Jeter of the Yankees this year. John Sterling and Michael Kay return to do the play-by-play, but they get to say more this time, as there are about 1500 calls and comments in the game. Plus the crowd's going to make more-realistic noise - if the home team is losing, they'll quiet down, just as if folks were leaving early. But if the home team is winning or it's a really exciting game, the crowd will react with the appropriate level of excitement. Finally, the game will have four modes of play: exhibition, season, play-off, and home run derby.

Watch for it in early April, right about the time the baseball season opens.