World Series Baseball Review

Sega's World Series Baseball for the Xbox looks, plays, and feels as though it's a completely different game when compared with its World Series Baseball predecessors. While the series earned its fame from the excellent Genesis and Saturn installments, the franchise lost a lot of its luster with two anemic offerings on the Dreamcast. In a pleasant change for the better, World Series Baseball for the Xbox delivers quality visuals, solid gameplay, tons of stat tracking, and one of the best franchise modes seen to date. However, in spite of the obvious improvements, World Series Baseball still has room for growth--specifically in regard to how much control you have during an actual game. But if off-the-field management is more your style, then you can't go wrong with the franchise mode. It really comes down to a question of what you're looking for in a game of baseball.

World Series Baseball offers a great deal of gameplay options...

The one thing that's immediately obvious from the moment you start navigating World Series Baseball's menus is that a lot of care has been taken to give the game longevity. The play modes include quick start, exhibition, season, playoffs, franchise, and home run derby. The game's franchise mode is completely new and gives you the ability to create your own team and play an endless number of seasons. World Series Baseball's franchise mode is quite extensive and offers a lot of unique options that can't be found in other baseball games. For instance, you can get reports throughout the season from your batting and pitching coaches about your team's performance, as well as from your minor league manager on potential player prospects. The coaches give you insight that really does help you decide whether or not a player should be signed to a big league club or not. You can also keep really good tabs on how well your players are performing, since the game includes tons of statistical information, including 24 individual batting categories and 21 individual pitching categories, like blown-save percentages. If a player starts slipping and looks to be on his way out, you can either demote him to the minors or possibly trade him. Major League Baseball includes all the usual trimmings that come with an officially licensed MLB game, such as all the real teams, players, and stadiums currently active today. Beyond that, the game also includes 25 Hall of Fame legends whom you can play as or against, including Nolan Ryan, Reggie Jackson, and Ernie Banks, along with some classic uniforms.

...the highlight being the franchise mode.

While there is no denying that World Series Baseball offers a lot of options off the field, some additional on-field gameplay elements should have been included. Just about the only thing you can do on defense is dive. You can't scale the wall to rob people of home runs, you can't jump up to grab a line-drive shot over a defender's head, and you can't change your batter's stance to try to pull the ball to one side of the field. Many of these same elements appear in other Xbox baseball games, like All-Star Baseball 2003 and Triple Play 2002. Aside from these basic control omissions, the mechanics in World Series Baseball are set up fairly well. However, you should be forewarned that the game's default setting has just about every batting and pitching aid turned on. While starting out with the batting cursors, pitching cursors, and fielding aids enabled might be great for beginners who want to learn how to play the game with minimal problems, it's a little off-putting at first for baseball veterans. Thankfully, you can turn just about every one of the aids off and even go in the game's option menu to tweak a few things, like the speed of the pitch.

The pitcher and batter interface in World Series Baseball is like other typical target-based batter/pitcher interfaces in baseball games. When batting, you have to try to line up your target with where you think the ball is going to end up and time your swing just right so that it cuts through the strike zone and makes contact with the ball. The hits you get are affected by the bat's position when contact is made, which encourages you to try to hit the ball with precision. With some practice, you'll learn how to improve your chances of hitting a grounder, hitting deep to the outfield, or targeting one side of the field. Also, in a realistic touch, the game is very conservative about doling out the home runs. Sluggers like Barry Bonds are more likely to hit a deep ball over the wall, since they have a larger contact area, but even so, the stats after a season will look fairly close to what you'd expect from a real-life home run hitter. Fielding and running the bases are also very traditional here--the buttons on the face of the Xbox controller are set up so that each button represents a base on the diamond. Running or throwing to a base simply requires that you push the button for the desired base.