All-Star Baseball 2002

"I think All-Star Baseball 1999 was better on the N64 then this game!"

I usually don't run out and buy videogames after I had my job where I got all the games for free. Well, not that the job is over I have to once again buy all the games I want. So when I saw that All-Star Baseball 2002 was out for Playstation 2 I thought that it was going to be a great baseball game. I was in the mood to play a baseball game with the updated rosters because the season just started so I decided to buy All-Star Baseball 2002 for 50 dollars at my local videogame store. I'm pretty disappointed that I threw away my money on this peice of junk.

Graphics: 3
The graphics in All-Star Baseball 2002 are horrible. The Playstation 2 is suppose to be a next generations system? What was Acclaim Sports thinking when they released this game? The player models are very choppy and have a lot of edges, the whole field is blurry, and the crowd is one of the worse crowds I have seen for a long time. The stadiums are the only thing that save the graphics because all of the stadiums are designed like their real-life counterparts. Other than that, the graphics in All-Star Baseball 2002 suck.

Gameplay: 7
Gameplay-wise, All-Star Baseball 2002 is what you would expect. It comes with a season mode, all star mode, practice mode, home run derby mode, and a few other goodies like that. Also, there is a hall of fame team which is a nice addition ot the game. Pitching and hitting is exactly like it was in the previous All-Star Baseball games except that the game seems a bit slower. Even though the gameplay is decent in All-Star Baseball 2002 it doesn't make up for the graphics.

Control: 6
I never really liked the control in the All-Star Baseball series. The control is too complex for most people. I usually like having my friends come over and letting them play for their first time and explaining the control to them from my memory. With this game, there is so many little things that you can do that you will always have to look in the instruction booklet to remember what to do. Baserunning is not a problem in the game, but I don't really like the batter/pitcher interface. Guessing the pitch seems a lot easier then it should be and if you guess the pitch there is a lot of a better chance that you can hit a homerun.

Sound: 5
There isn't really much sound in the game. Yes, you can hear ball or strike but that's basically it. You can hear the crowd cheering all the time which gets pretty annoying after a while. Basically, this game is soundless. It's surprising that on the back cover of the game they don't say anything about the sound because Acclaim Sports probably knows that the sound sucks in the game.

Overall: 4
Overall, this game is pretty bad. If you want to play a good baseball game I think that you should probably go with High Heat 2002. I'm not sure if that game is good but I read some reviews on it that said that it was a lot better than this game. I don't know what Acclaim Sports was thinkinm when they released this game, but I think that this game should have been delayed a few months to fix up the mistakes.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 07/22/01, Updated 07/22/01