All-Star Baseball 2003

"Going, Going, Gone!"

The 2nd installment on the PS2 really soars. Since they make sport game every year, all you can expect is a years worth of development. This game exceeded my expectation of how much a baseball game could be. You don't hear much about baseball games because the Football and Basketball games dominate the genre, but this is a great 2002-2003 roster line-up worth buying, or renting.

Gameplay: 8/10
Ok so they got the basic modes of any baseball; exhibition, quick play, franchise, tournament, and homer run derby. Each mode plays quite nicely expect for a few things:

-Batting can be confusing unless batting help is turned on which allows you to easily hit the ball, or you can try to guess where the ball is going to be thrown, but I never figured that, that was much help. When running you can easily miss telling him to run or go back to the base, which makes scoring runs a little tougher.

-Pitchers suffer from a lack of pitching variety, and they have this instant ability to catch anything that blasts right past them.

-Fielders lack a sense of intelligence by having slow read to get easy outs. The also tend to make nearly impossible catches quite often, which always seems to favor the AI quite more than it favors you.

But of course there are good elements to this game that other games don't do as well. Home Runs aren't given up that easily, and triples are rare. By playing through season mode all stats will be mirror images of how they are in real life.

Here is where the game takes a little fall. Character models don't model much of how the players look in some of the other new baseball games, but the people are still recognizable. The batters also lack a good variety of batting warm-ups when the camera shows them coming up. This doesn't hurt the game extremely since you don't get close ups in the game.

I thought the creators did well on making the perfect sounds including the theme song of the game which is nicely played throughout choosing what you want to do. The National Anthem can get annoying at the start of each game, but the in game commentary is done at a mediocre level, after a hit is made there is a good variety and randomness of comments made, but what really ruins it is when someone comes up to bat. Throughout the season the same comment is made about the player, which gets annoying after the first and second game.

This game can get very frustrating until you get the hang of it (We're talking after the first 10 games) But then it becomes fun and you become the world champion. As I said before the batting is one of the hardest things I've ever seen unless you've mastered the pitching guess or are doing two player. you can always just turn batting help on.

Like most sport games, you can always just keep coming back and back, play new teams, create more players, or make your own team with Expansion mode. This game will keep you coming back for more and more. Even though there are the newer versions of this out there, this is still fun if you can find it cheap.

So Basically I'm saying that this is a must have for die hard baseball fans of the 2001-2002 season. It's the best baseball game of the 2002 year. If you can find it cheap definitely buy it. Here are some other ideas to take into account the purchase of this game:

Pros
2001-2002 Season Roster
-Cheap
-Under $15
-Fun baseball game

Cons
-You didn't like the 2001-2002 Season Roster
-You want the new and nicer games
-You find it expensive for $20+
-You don't like baseball or baseball games

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/16/04, Updated 04/04/06