Big League Baseball 2005 is the best statistical and strategic simulation of baseball available on mobile, but it also has the least appealing interface of this year's offerings. The game features the full rosters of all 30 MLB teams, complete with statistics for each player. Pitchers all have their four main throws; and batters have four types of hits. The difficulty is well tuned and yields appropriate scores for a game of baseball. Unfortunately, you aren't given much control over pitching, and the game's isometric camera angle is difficult to deal with when batting. In general, Big League Baseball is a great simulation for baseball fans, but it's a less-than-stellar gameplay experience.
In Big League Baseball, you can either play an exhibition game or try your luck at championship mode, which works like a typical MLB playoff. In either case, you'll choose your starting pitcher and your batting lineup, after being presented with the relevant statistics to inform that choice. This is a level of complexity that most mobile developers would eschew, citing that it belongs in a hardcore sim. Baseball fans, however, will surely appreciate it.
The action is shown from a simple isometric perspective, from which the game never deviates. Fielding looks OK from this angle, but it's impossible to gauge the height of a pitch. This is too bad since, you know, you need to decide which ones you want to swing at. It's nice that you're given four types of swings, but these are useless if it's impossible to tell which throws are strikes and which are balls.
Despite its unfortunate viewpoint, Big League Baseball 2005 actually looks and sounds very good for a game on the old LG VX6000. Some of the animations look a little slow, but that's to be expected. This is a popular handset, and it's nice to see that THQ was able to develop something of this audiovisual quality on more than just early-adopter hardware.
Big League Baseball's faithful translation of baseball statistics makes it a great choice for the enthusiast. Big League's gameplay, however, is not the best in its class. Casual fans would do well to look elsewhere.
