Gaming Target - PlayStation 2: All-Star Baseball 2003

Written by John Scalzo on March 11, 2002

Full Review: Joltin' Joe has left and gone away.

All-Star Baseball is an enduring sports series that on a good day can match the realism and fun factor of any sports series out there. From it's humble beginnings on the Saturn and Playstation to it's glory days as the best baseball game the Nintendo 64 has to offer to today when it stands as the only baseball to appear on all three next generation consoles.

There's a lot to like about All-Star Baseball 2003. Every tiny detail you could ever expect is included here. All of the rosters are updated to roughly a few weeks of All-Star Baseball's late February release. Stadiums are very faithfully recreated. Even the color scheme matches perfectly. Fake companies were put in place of the real ones, but the colors match. As is always the case with All-Star, the virtual players mirror their real life counterparts. Chipper Jones has high socks, Barry Bonds has his bionic armor, and Mike Piazza is the best catcher in the game (OK, that's a personal opinion, but I'm a Mets fan). It's only when it comes time to field a ball and the graphics look a little soft do I miss the sharpness of the N64 All-Star. What sounds there are come off pretty good. Crowd noise is almost nonexistent, with a little golf clap being the real standout. Thom Brennaman does the play by play and he sounds kinda robotic. Steve Lyons does the color commentary and he's pretty good, if a little repetitive. Together they turn in a decent showing, but I miss the non-stop chatter of the 2000 edition.

The heart of All-Star's lineup has always been the depth of batting and pitching options. Making a return in the 2003 edition are all of the batting options. Hitting is still performed by lining up the batting cursor with the incoming pitch and swinging. You can still make your cursor bigger by guessing which pitch the pitcher is going to throw by using the L2 button. You still can use the right analog stick to position where you want to hit the ball. And there is still the option to shrink your cursor and swing for the fences.

The pitching options are just as deep as ever and Acclaim has even managed to add in some new features. You select what type of pitch you want from the list, aim with the cursor and throw. It's that simple, yet is very precise. Too precise. There's still no need to ever throw a ball outside the strike zone. This is a minor nitpick, but Acclaim is making steps to fix this. They have revamped the fatigue meter so that when a pitcher gets tired he starts missing his mark. It's a step in the right direction, but they're not there just yet. What is completely perfect though is the pitch selection available. Every pitcher has between three and five available pitches and Acclaim has seen fit to include every pitch ever used in a Major League game. The slurve (a combination slider curve) is a selectable pitch. A slurve. I don't think I know five baseball fans that know what a slurve is. Acclaim has also added in the slide step delivery as an option if you need to keep a runner close to the bag.

All-Star Baseball also has as many modes of play as innings in a game. There's the standard set of Exhibition and Single Season options. Where All-Star shines though is it's deep Franchise and Expansion modes. There's not a whole lot of difference between the two, you still take your team through as many as 20 seasons with enough stat tracking to make the people at Elias blush. Sure, running a franchise with the Mets is fun and all, but the Expansion mode is where it's at. You pick the city, you build your stadium, you choose your logo (from a pre-made list), you draft your team, and you take your team to the top by managing Minor Leaguers, signing veterans, and making shrewd trades. I have waited a long time for a true Expansion mode and Acclaim has granted my wish. They've even gone the extra mile and given the expansion ballparks just as much personality as the real ones. For example if you place a team in the Great White North (fancy talk for Alaska) you can actually see the breath of your players. Rounding out the nine modes would be a deep Create-a-Player mode, Batting Practice, Home Run Derby, and a cool little Trivia Game. All nice for a diversion and they make an already deep game even deeper. Piled on top of this massive list of modes is the ability to earn Baseball Cards by performing certain offensive and defensive feats. Various combinations of cards will unlock cheats like Big Heads, throwback uniforms, hidden stadiums, and a slew of other stuff. A nice touch and I particularly like that they're real card designs created by Donruss.

Unfortunately all of these great modes are hampered by a lackluster fielding interface. I've played the hell out of the N64 releases, and this game just has a steeper learning curve. Part of it is getting used to the new PS2 control setup. Of course the other part of it is that the control is just unintuitive. Look at the Madden series, a ton of commands, but easy to just pick it up and go. Here though, you'll have to keep going back to the manual even after you've played it for a bunch of hours. There's also too much reliance on analog hitting and throwing control. When I have to make a conscious effort to push down on the button hard enough, it's too much. Acclaim's latest fielding innovation is the Future Throw. You pick what base you're going to throw the ball to before you throw it. If you don't pick what base you want to throw to or hesitate in any way the computer will snag a few extra bases on you. And if you don't pick which base you throw to it automatically goes home. Forget an easy grounder to the shortstop, if you don't hit that first base button the computer will be safe easy.

The more control is amplified by the presence of more than a few animation glitches. Collision detection is the worst offender as players will walk right through each other, standing directly on a catch circle will sometimes result in the ball flying right through your body, and standing right on top of a loose ball and not being able to pick it up. These glitches don't happen often enough to be a real distraction, but at an average of one a game, they're bad enough you'll notice. Worst of these glitches though is the tag detection. Tags that happen several feet ahead of the runner and will end in out calls. This glitch happens so often it makes me wonder if Acclaim even play tested this game.