Never played a single player game yet. So this is from a different
perspective then most here.


FIRST THE TRIVIAL SHIT:

Again like every other game ever reviewed. If something seems a little
easy or strange and your on the Rookie level please try the Pro level
before arguing about it. CPU baserunners are more agressive in the Pro
mode.

To the guy who had skipping problems wipe the bottom of your disk.

There are 3 stlye of Background music. So it's not all REM'ish. :)

#1 Trivial piece. Updated roster or batting position. If you want it up
to date or a more correct batting order change it. Duhhh. Like this is
a big deal. 


NOW ON TO THE SHOW:

Menus - A
Setup Mulitplayer - B-
Stadium Graphics - A
Player Graphics  - B-
Player Animations - B-
Sound - A
Speech - A+
Depth of Comentary - A+
Playabiity - B
Realistic Stradegy - C
Options - A-
Pitching - B
Batting - A-
Fielding Flys - A
Fielding Groundballs - B-
Players in their right positions - D
Base Running/Stealing - A+
Multiplayer - B
Fun - B+
Stats - C
System Link - F (Must have forgot to send the right master)


Setting up a major multiplayer game is gonna take some time and
patience since your gonna have to assign each player to their
respective positions. It works fine but it's somewhat tedious but worth
it.


Batting

There's only two negative things I can come up with here and about 5
positives.

Neg 1. It doesn't have the harder follow the cursor stlye batting.
Since there's a constingent that swears by it then there should be an
option for it. But for a muliplayer enviroment with people dropping in
and out all the time the regular timing the hit style works good and
probably better for newbies not to get frustrated at batting.

Neg 2. Animation is a little weak and everybody is about the same. When
moving in the box the player glides and a actual animation would be
nice here. Were talking the little things here but these are the real
things that make you say wow!

Pos 1. You can move in the box.

Pos. 2. You can aim your batter better than anything I've seen prior.
Change your stance, aim for fly, grounder, left or right and they work
too! Throwin some wind and you have some good control for hitting.

Pos. 3. Home Runs aren't a dime a dozen.

Pos. 4. Many different style of hits. With contact and power swings.

Pos. 5. It's easy for all players to understand.


***In Multiplayer***

If your control the player in the field you control him when he bats.
BUTTTTTTT...... sometimes it game gets confused and some other player
on your team starts controlling the wrong batter. And one time a player
from the other team was up to bat. The good thing is that you can
change this by pressing the triangle button but you'll need to
recoginize this before the first pitch. This is probably the second
most annoying bug I found in the game. 

Overall very good. If you can forgive no cursor following for the sake
of new player limitations in a multiplayer enviroment. If not oh well.


Pitching

Decent not the best but not the worst either. Even though the book says
you can pitch high or low as I recall I had a dickens of a time with
just that. So that's weak. A lot of complaining has been going on that
every pitcher an throw every throw again strange but lets add the fact
the you maybe able to throw every ball but you wouldn't want to.
Dependant on your pitchers ability will determine if he can really
throw a good style of pitch or not. For ex. your fastball specialist
can throw a sinker but is it really just a slow slow fastball because
your pitcher can't get it to drop? So there's a little more to the
story than what's being stated.

Overall this is average to good.

**** In Multiplayer: If you control a pitcher and lets say the CF. If
you make a play in center on the previous batter your gonna have to
switch control back to the pitcher otherwise the CPU starts to throw
pitches. This should have been more automatic as the whole multiplyer
thing could have been a little tighter in these types of repects.


Fielding Making Plays

Good and probably as good as I've seen although I have yet to see a
perfect one by a good stretch.


**** Multiplayer: Lets say your going 3 humans vs. 3 humans (a definate
fun game!). Usually you would have each player control 3 players each.
I recommend never to have on guy control the players right next to each
other. For ex. LF and CF. Why?? Lets say you hit the ball in the left
center field. If you controlled both you would only be able to move one
player to the ball and to add sometimes the cpu chooses the wrong
player to control between the two. If one player is CF the other LF
then both players can go after it, make sure you keep a distance or
"Ewww that's gotta hurt" is ready to be announced. Plus if the one
kunclehead misses it you can back him up with the other  out fielder.

For grounders in multiplayer I also recommend that each player plays
every ball at first like it's his guy even if it isn't. Why because you
lose focus sometimes and forget who's controlling who and you see a
grounder go right by you before you realized "Duhh that was my guy". So
if you play it at least to the point you know it's you or not will
reduce errors.

Fielding Stradegies:

#1 Problem. When playing how do you change fielding positions like
Double Play, Gaurd Lines ect...? Plese, I must have missed this. The
only way I could figure this out and let me say it was and is a painful
way of doing it is...... Pause, go to option, setup controllers and
make my player the manger then go back to the game put in the fielding
codes then go back change back to player and resume. Arrrggggghhhhh!!

I must be doing something wrong. And hopefully there is an auto field
adjust the cpu can do during no-brainer situations. If so then this
whole section becomes great becasue this problem is really the only
near major weakness in the fielding.

Ok lets say I don't want to change fielding stradegies and I stay with
the normal set. Well then my friend your gonna get killed and be way
out of position for the likes of:

Routine double plays, the guys won't set up properly and it won't
happen.

Worse yet. Stealling 2 to 3rd do it everytime because the 3rd baseman
will be playing way back and off of third, instead of near third for
the tag. 

This has to be better than this and it might. I'll take a big
concentrated effort tonight to see how to change field positions
easily.

Overall the timing of hit location to throw to the base runner is
pretty good. You'll sometimes get a ground hit that should be an out
but the fielding just doesn't have the time to make. Sometimes you'll
see a throw out at first or second from the outfield that shouldn't
happen and sometimes you'get extra bases where you probably shouldn't.

I like that you have a conservative and a agressive throw button. The
latter might get you out of a tight jam but the chance of that throw
sailing high or wide is increased. Nice idea!

Control and fluidity of the players in the field is pretty good as
well.



Base Running:

****Multiplayer: The second most beautiful part of the game next to the
announcing.

It's like cutting butter on a hot scorching somer day. Smoooth..... Ok
lets say you hit the ball get on first. Then your buddy come up to bat
next. Well you still have control of your guy on first and you can
concentrate solely on stealing and your buddy solely on batting neat. 

One better lets say I got a single and my other player bats next (since
were controlling more than one player) well I take control of the
batter my buddy presses the triangle button and wala he's running the
first baseman. This whole process is just neat. I love it!

For some reason it took a while for all clunk heads to realize by
pressing up on the d-pad advances the runner and down brings them back
to the base. They always wanted to pull the d-pad in the direction of
the base. But we finnaly taught those monkey's. On leading off you
press the L1 and R1 again easy as pie.

Also you have two differnt slides but I haven't had the opportunity to
practice that much.


STATS

Are a little weak. And I don't believe you can get game stats at leat
in exhibition mode. Average Average Average. No actual human player
stats for people controlled. Average Average Average.

Commentray

League of it's own. You'll be surprised by what you here next. Large
and customizable vocabulary. Awesome.

You'll have an announcer and a ump talking at the same time and the ump
sound like Yosemite Sam when calling strikes. Strike 2 being the most
cartoonish.


Sounds

Very good. Bat crack is excellent and varied.

Crowd sounds are splendid.

In fact raise to everybody working in the sound department these guys
are the pro's.

Overall Multiplayer:

It's a blast and takes a little patients to get all the guys up and
going. But once you start going you will have fun and what was
refreshing was that there are a lot of buttons to press the intuitivity
of these buttons are very very good. There are some control player
glitches as sometimes the game sems forget who really controls who.
This gives the game a little rush feeling, becasue I can't believe they
didn't know this.

The field positioning is critical to really playing a perferct game of
ball so I have to find a better way of changing these as the game goes.
I feel if this was handled you can play some pretty memorable games
with a group of friends.

I recommend splitting up the players and play humans vs. humans. The
computer is gonna be tough to beat with a gang of humans verses it. Why
because your gonna get some communication problems fielding with
multiple humans that the computer is gonna take advantage of. If it's
human vs. human these things tend to even themselves out. Not
impossible however but it's gonna be difficult.


Finals:

It's good to great in multiplayer mode. If one of the other baseball
enteries allows 8 humans to play, I'll check them out otherwise I'm
staying here.

You still shake your head though wondering why things just can't be
seen and corrected to make a near perfect game. Gives you a feeling
that maybe these games really are for kids. It has flaw but every game
does, so don't try to bury this one.


BH