High Heat Baseball 2000 is easily the worst baseball game to come out for the PlayStation this year. In fact, it's one of the worst baseball games ever released for the platform. The game is inferior to games like Triple Play 2000 and MLB 2000 in every way and doesn't offer anything worth checking out.
The game has the standard features and modes of any other baseball game - exhibition, quick play, season, home run challenge, and playoffs. The one unique mode in the game is... family mode. No, you can't make your aunt play third and put your second cousin at short. It just turns on auto fielding and base running, so... uh... the rest of your family can play without actually having to have a brain.
The control is sluggish and unresponsive, mostly due to the lengthy throwing animation in the field. And since the game uses the same throwing animation whether you're sending a ball in from the outfield or shuttling the ball over to second from the shortstop, you're always waiting. Compounding this problem is the overall speed of the game. It moves too slowly and is rather unbalanced. For instance, turning double plays is incredibly rare - the ball almost has to be hit directly at a fielder to pull it off. This happens because the speed of the ball travels unrealistically slow in relation to the speed of the players running the bases.
Batting never seems to make sense. You must swing way before the pitch looks like it's near the plate to get a hit, and even when you get the timing down, it doesn't seem to be a consistent way to get base hits. You can't move your batter within the batter's box, so there's no way to chase an outside pitch or get away from an inside one. When you are pitching, it's almost as if you have to fight the pitch to keep it in the strike zone. You select what type of pitch you want to throw and then subtly control the pitch when the ball is on its way. You can use the after touch to try to direct where the ball will end up. It never looks as though it's going to make it to the strike zone, so you have to use the after touch simply to get it there.
Graphically, High Heat Baseball 2000 looks quite poor, especially in comparison with other PlayStation ball games like Triple Play 2000 and MLB 2000. The players are made up of simple polygons that give them a very boxy, unrealistic look. These models look even worse, since the player animations aren't all that great and have bad transition between one another. On a positive note, the 37 different stadiums in the game look decent and represent the real-life stadiums fairly accurately. The sound in the game is also done well enough that it helps add to the baseball atmosphere. The game uses the voice talents of Giants announcer Ted Robinson pretty well, too.
In the end, with all of High Heat Baseball 2000's shortcomings, the game is by no means worthwhile, especially when you have so many better baseball games to choose from. Do yourself a favor and stay away from this one.
