World Series Baseball 2K3 Preview
We check out the latest entry in Sega's World Series Baseball franchise on the Xbox.
With the start of the MLB season just around the corner, developers and publishers are in the midst of vying for video game baseball supremacy. Sega will enter the fray with World Series Baseball 2K3, which essentially builds upon the features introduced in last year's World Series Baseball for the Xbox. As such, the newest installment in Sega's baseball franchise will feature its predecessor's incredibly in-depth franchise mode, as well as a variety of other modes and gameplay tweaks. Unfortunately, the Xbox and PlayStation 2 versions of the game will both lack online play this year.
As with most sports games, the most appealing feature for fans of the sport is the franchise mode, and World Series Baseball 2K3's franchise mode gets as close as possible to mimicking the duties of a team owner and general manager. After selecting a team, you'll be asked to draft managers for different positions in your club, such as the batting coach, the pitching coach, the minor league director, the scouting director, and the team manager. Each of these coaches has a different rating in various categories, as well as a different price, which will give you a fairly good indication of whether it's worth spending some of your draft points on a particular manager. Depending on your view of the sport, you may want to draft a high-profile scouting manager so you have a better chance of securing high-quality talent in the future, or you might want to take a more balanced approach to constructing a staff.
After completing the management draft, you can then perform general managerial tasks for the team. You can take an in-depth look at your pitching staff and the current team lineup, as well as make trades, sign free agents, bring players up from the minors, manage contracts, or view the team budget, which includes projected income for the season (an important feature, since it affects your ability to draft future talent). The simulation is so deep that even team performance can affect the income level. As a result, if your team isn't playing well, you'll have less money at the end of the season due to lack of fan interest in the team.
There's quite a bit of information to track, but any stat-savvy baseball fan will undoubtedly love to dive into the list of player names in an effort to create and maintain an excellent team. When the season is over, you'll get to see how your players have improved (or regressed) and draft new players depending on the individual needs of your team. If you're not particularly interested in team management, you can always try out some of the more gameplay-oriented modes.
One such mode is the big league challenge, which is essentially a home run derby in which players from the MLB are pitted against one another. Basically, each player gets a chance to hit as many home runs as possible before getting three outs, which will be given for strikes and foul balls. There's also the Sega Sports challenge, which tracks your statistics over a series of games so you can have them ranked against other users' statistics by entering a code on the Sega Sports Web site. Of course, you can also just jump right into a game with the quick game or exhibition options.
World Series Baseball 2K3 Quick Links
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- Sega
- Blue Shift
- Baseball Sim
- Release: Mar 10, 2003
- ESRB: Everyone
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