All-Star Baseball 2003

"The batting forgot one small thing.......THESE GUYS ARE PROFESSIONALS!!!!!!"

Let me just preface this review by saying I loved everything about this game except for the batting. Now before I get flamed and people accuse me of flat out sucking, I played at least a dozen games and got plenty of hits. I do ''get'' what the batting system is all about. The problem I have with it is not the fact that the pitches come in so fast, it's that the cursor moves too slowly. You can only move it a fraction of an inch between the time it leaves the pitcher's hand and the time it reaches the catcher's mitt.

For those who don't know, the batting consists of learning where a pitcher is pitching you through use of your pitching chart from previous at-bats, your hot/cold chart, and using both of these things to essentially guess where the pitch is going. You then put the cursor in that general area and don't have much room to adjust once the pitch is airborne. Therein lies the problem. I agree with other people who say that the pros generally try to guess the location of a pitch when they are batting for real. What makes this game unrealistic is that a real pro should be able to at least adjust enough to get some wood on the ball and at least foul it off, if not send a weak ball into the infield. Example: I'm using a guy who's in his fourth at bat of the night. According to my pitching chart, this pitcher has been pitching me low and inside all night with a little variation to the inside or low occasionally. I'm at 2 strikes now, and I've been generally positioning my cursor low and inside like I should be. I had just fouled 1 ball off and swung and missed another. I put my cursor in the ''proper'' position again. Now the pitcher throws his pitch and it's HIGH and OUTSIDE. The way the batting works in this game, there is no way in heck I can get the cursor even close. So I strike out. In my mind, a true professional would have been able to extend his arms and at least weakly foul it off or something, but this game doesn't even give you the chance. Yes, the pitcher did a good job of fooling me, but I shouldn't always have no chance at all to even make contact, however poor that contact may be.

You can turn on easy hitting where you just swing and don't worry about positioning a cursor, but then you never ever strike out and the game is really boring. There's just no middle ground between the easy batting system and the standard batting.

Everything else about this game was fine. The graphics were adequate with great animations. The pitching was pretty standard stuff and fun. The fielding was great too. And I loved the ability to collect the player cards. It's just too bad that the hitting, which professed to be so real, just didn't take into account that it wasn't actually poor, pathetic, unskilled me standing in the batter's box, but a professional with the ability to make adjustments to pitches as the situation dictates.

I returned this game and put my money on World Series Baseball. Sega Sports is where it's at with sports games nowadays. Don't even get me started about EA's Triple Play.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 04/06/02, Updated 04/06/02