Those who remember Digital Chocolate CEO Trip Hawkins' work at 3DO, the company responsible for the respected baseball series High Heat, won't be terribly surprised to learn that one of his mobile company's debut games is a baseball title. Digital Chocolate's Baseball Heroes of the MLBPAA focuses on the exciting dynamics between pitcher and batter while ignoring every other aspect of the game. The result is a high-quality--albeit limited--experience.
Baseball Heroes' 16 teams feature the stars of yesteryear rather than highlighting today's multimillionaire players. If you're playing as the Yankees, Yogi Berra will be catching your pitches, not John Flaherty. The degree to which Baseball Heroes can appeal to your nostalgia is limited by the fact that your in-game avatars have nothing to do with the Hall of Famers on whom they are based, save for their names. However, the anachronistic matchups that arise might amuse sports history enthusiasts.
In the name of simplicity, Baseball Heroes omits some of the more obscure elements of America's pastime, such as "fielding" or "baserunning." Instead, the game lets you control only batting and pitching. To hit a ball, you have only to press the 5 key. Where and how far it flies depends on your timing and the hitter's stats. The game's batting physics seem to be reasonable. For example, if a right-handed batter hits the ball a bit late, it flies to the right. Similarly, if he hits the ball early, it flies to the left. In this way, you are given a certain amount of control over your offense, despite the one-button interface.
Pitching is no more complex. You have five throws to choose from, which include your typical fare of sinkers, curveballs and changeups. Once you've chosen a pitch, you decide where to throw it by pressing the key that corresponds to a numbered location on an onscreen grid. A pitch low and to the inside of a right-handed batter would be triggered by pressing the 9 key, for example. This system feels pretty mechanical because you can essentially choose where the ball will end up. Your pitcher will occasionally miss, however.
In its default mode of difficulty, Baseball Heroes is much too easy. You'll be able to defeat far-more-powerful teams with ease. On its hardest difficulty level--MVP--Baseball Heroes starts to become challenging, but this is largely because your batting ability is reduced. Perhaps these shifts are meant to indicate differences between the "deadball" and "liveball" eras of baseball. Another theory is that the game's artificial intelligence just isn't particularly deep.
While its gameplay is somewhat restrictive, Baseball Heroes does what it sets out to do well. The game animates at a decent clip, and it plays some fairly convincing baseball sounds. With a season mode, a challenge mode (in which the goal is to score a single run against progressively better teams), and a home run derby mode, there's quite a bit to hold player interest as well. However, it seems telling that the home run derby mode isn't appreciably different from the batting of any other game type. With fielding and baserunning handled automatically, the whole game is essentially a home run derby in which you sometimes play the role of pitcher.
Baseball Heroes of the MLBPAA is an incomplete rendering of the baseball experience. If you can reconcile yourself with this fact, you'll find that there's a lot to like here. With simple controls and a default game length of three innings, Baseball Heroes is great for short play sessions, which is the staple of the mobile platform. Purists, however, might be wary of this "lite" version of the sport.
