ESPN Baseball may be the best on the market, but it isn't good enough.
User Rating: 7.9 | ESPN Major League Baseball XBOX
There are so many things to comment on and I have so little time. So I'll just break down the pros and cons and embellish a bit on each point. Pros: Pitching: The method used for placing your pitch is great. Unlike other games that let you move a cursor around and allow you to throw with pinpoint accuracy, here you are pitching "blindly". Select your pitch, adjust the "effort" (basically speed), and then move the left thumbstick to influence the position of the ball. This is a nice, realistic feature. You might mean to put a fastball high and inside, but instead find it coming in low at the letters. A great touch. Catcalls: Imagine this: Johnny Damon at the plate in New York. "Hey Damon, cut your hair you hippie!" Yes, this bit of sound is actually in the game. Nearly had a heart attack first time I heard it. Many players have specific catcalls meant just for them. "Hey Varitek, you're an easy out." A nice flourish to the game environment. Faithfully built stadiums: What a great job they did recreating the stadiums. Everything is just as it is in real life. The stadiums tend to be very crisp and immersive. The ball reacts well to the odd wall angles found in Fenway and other parks. Batting Stances: Great job on recreating real life batting stances. The generic stances and swings seem to be few and far between. Windups and deliveries: Just like the batting stances, you'll be able to spot your favorite pitcher on the mound without looking at his name. His signature stance is in the game and animated quite well. Cons: Confidence Meter: A great concept but such poor implementation. The confidence meter is meant to give a performance boost to players who are playing well. For example, the confidence of a hitter will go up after he pounds a 3 run homer, and the confidence of a pitcher will go down at the same time. Great idea, right? Yes, it's a great idea. But like I said, the implementation is awful. Namely, confidence is not affected in enough situations. As a pitcher, the only way to boost your confidence is to throw a strikeout. Getting out of a jam won't do it, retiring the side in order won't do it. In fact, I recently threw a 2 hit shutout and my pitcher's confidence was almost rock bottom because I didn't throw many strikeouts. Meanwhile, the opposition's pitchers were quite confident despite their 8 run deficit because I tend to strike out a bit. Strong outfield arms: This is ridiculous. Have you ever seen Manny Ramirez throw a bullet to home plate? You will in this game. Each and every game. The outfield arms are ridiculously strong. Every throw is an absolute rocket to the intended target. Because of this, extra base hits are a little on the rare side. Smash a liner into the gap and more often than not you're stuck with a single. Even the announcers say "that should be extra bases" but if you decide to book it, have fun finding the ball waiting for you at second. I'm not saying extra base hits don't happen, because they do happen a lot. But not as often as they should. Also, a bigger pain, is that advancing a runner from first to third on a single, a common event in baseball, is near impossible. Weak infield arms: Oh my lord, the infield arms are terrible. Be prepared to see some sad lobs from short stop to first. What should be a double play ball hit to the short stop is often a one out play at best. Plus, the transition from glove to hand is typically slower than it should be. Pulling first baseman off first: Ok, so you just made an amazing catch on an infield grounder. You toss it to first -- but your throw is off and it pulls the first baseman off the bag. Safe. Again, as with so many things in this game, a great idea. This happens in real baseball. But the regularity with which it happens in ESPN is pathetic. Expect to see it happen at least twice per game per team. Would be nice if the first basemen stretched from time to time. Insane # of homeruns: 20 game season on All-Star setting. Sliders set largely in favor of defense. Ortiz had 38 homeruns. Lowest number on my team was 23. Yeah. It's that bad. My lowest run production in any game was 11. Highest was 33. Muddy faces: Almost laughable player faces. Some are recognizable -- but not by much. Choppy animation: Want to see some truly bad animation? Get this game and field a fly ball. BAD. Instant replays are also terrible. Repetitive commentary: "He nearly screwed himself into the ground." Expect to hear it at least once an inning after taking a big swing and whiffing. Little to no crowd interaction: If I have a 5 run inning at home I want the crowd to make some noise! String together a rally with 2 outs? Make some noise! Hit a game tying homer in the bottom of the 9th? Make some noise! But the crowd doesn't care. It appears they're only at the park for the hot dogs. Overpower pitches are not overpowering: I can't stress this point enough: There is little to no difference in the quality of pitching between different pitchers. In other words, nearly all pitchers are interchangeable. You'd expect that Pedro would be more overpowering than Kim, right? He'd probably get more strikeouts. His stronger arm would throw the hitters off balance. Nope. It doesn't matter. So far as I can tell, the only difference between pitchers is the pitch selection. Stamina plays a big role when it comes to relievers, but for starters it doesn't really matter. Had Schilling into the 7th inning having allowed 1 run, 3 hits, and thrown only 50 pitches. He was "exhausted." Exhausted after 50 pitches? Are you kidding me? 7th inning seems to be the cutoff for starters. Sometimes you can go beyond it, sometimes you wont 'make it that far, but overall it seems that regardless of performance 7th inning is where you get worn out. Overall: I know I've made this sound pretty terrible. That really isn't the case. Overall it's quite an enjoyable game of baseball. But so many things feel so rushed and underdeveloped that it's hard to think of the game as anything but a prototype.
