High Heat 2004 attempts to mask aesthetic issues with core gameplay. The problem is that said gameplay isn't very good.
The aesthetics in High Heat 2004 are absolutely appalling. From dumbfoundedly basic and generic character models to obtrusive camera angles, the visuals fall quite short. The game is just ugly, and if it were plain I could look past it.... but it isn't plain. The camera zooms in on your player, oftentimes obscuring the location of the ball, when it gets jacked into the outfield. Whenever it shows a player doing anything on the field, the camera view is so dead on that you'd think everyone was wearing their hats backwards with the logo on the back. With weak field textures, a laughable crowd, and no visual panache to speak of, High Heat 2004 is nothing to look at... at all. The commentary is stilted and forced as well, and when you cut out the batter walking to the plate, instead of a segue into the next pitcher-hitter matchup, you get cut off words and a clean slate. It's just another little thing that the developers didn't seem necessary... they were focusing on "gameplay."
Which is good, but not great. The fielding works solid, the pitching is a blast, and the hitting is okay, which levels off at good. The fielding is smooth and painless, but at the same time having the same designate for diving and jumping is unnecessary and renders the function less than useful, especially when shagging fly balls. The pitching is great because it feels like pitching... feeling your way around the corners, balls with lots of snap (a tad much, but that's part of video game baseball), and a game that admits that strikeouts can happen on both sides... the ball speed is low however and must dramatically upped, even for the slowest of gamers. The hitting is fun and easy to get a grip on as well thanks to the non-cursor setup, but at the same time, some analog positions provide less than stellar bat placement, and half of the first dozen games you play is spent learning how a swing like this does that, and vice versa. It's a bit too trial and error and takes from the experience a bit.
The AI is decent in that it does provide a realistic experience... that experience is either beating up on someone like the '27 Yankees over last year's Devil Rays or getting beat vice versa. The difficulty levels spike schizophrenically and do not provide a gentle learning curve, which is unfortunate.
I came into this game hoping a competent audiovisual display would hold up the outstanding brilliance of fantastic gameplay. Instead, a lacklustre look, sound, and feel hamper a game that plays solidly but just can't deliver the goods. If 3DO expects this franchise to hold its own year after year, it had bbetter make sure that either its gameplay is untouchable or it pays attention to the experience itself. Baseball is vendors shouting for peanuts (unlike high heat's vendors, who sell burgers... in the stands, apparently), a crowd swaying with the ebb and flow of a game, the tension and psychological drama of every single at-bat... I can see how this used to be acceptable, but as baseball games continue to improve, as the genre continues to open up to more and more rival titles from publishers, High Heat will have less and less to say unless the gameplay is sparked with some more innovation and the aesthetics are spruced up something dear. Not outlandishly bad, but a disappointment in almost every way.