Baseball Essay Research Paper AllStar Baseball 2002It

Baseball Essay, Research Paper

All-Star Baseball 2002

It’s not perfect, but this is the best overall game of hardball that you’ll find on PS2.

March 19, 2001

After a slow start on PlayStation and Saturn, Acclaim’s All-Star Baseball series went on to become fairly popular and well-regarded on Nintendo 64. But since the series became an exclusive to Nintendo’s system, fans of other consoles were left out in the cold and often wondering if the game was really deserving of all that adoration. This needn’t be a concern any longer because Acclaim has delivered the latest game in its heralded series, All-Star Baseball 2002, to Sony’s newly released PlayStation 2.

Developed by Acclaim Studios Austin, All-Star Baseball stands as one of the most feature rich baseball games that you’ll find on a console. It doesn’t offer nearly as much as the typical baseball simulation on the PC, but most players will find that all of the important bases have been covered here.

The game offers a bevy of gameplay modes including Quick Play, Exhibition, All-Star Game, Season, Series, Home Run Derby and Batting Practice. The individual games and seasons are highly customizable, with options like Stadium, Game Time (day, night, twilight), Weather (no precipitation, rain, snow), Sky (clear, fair, overcast, stormy), and game difficulty (rookie, veteran, and all-star) being settable for individual games.

The season is equally as customizable, with the only shortcoming being that it only allows for one human controlled team per season, so people looking to play the same season with friends or family don’t really have that option. Otherwise, the schedule can be set to 162 game unbalanced, 81 game half season, three game league round robin, on game league round robin, 87 game round robin, 29 game round robin, 162 game unbalanced non-interleague, 162 game balanced.

And for those of you that would rather not play with the regular major league rosters, the game has a very hearty Player Draft that enables you to build a team based on your picks in a draft involving all of the players included in the game.

The stadiums are highly detailed and ultra-realistic.

If you look really closely, you’ll probably be able to see gum on the seats.

Check out those two girls making out in the third row.

Beyond the fantasy draft, the regular roster management abilities are similarly as deep. The line-ups can be setup specifically for playing against a left- or right-handed pitcher and with or without a designated hitter and it’s easy to do all the basic stuff like sub player, swap position, and swap order. The pitchers can be distinguished between starting rotation, middle relief, long relief, and closer.

The game, however, requires that you have five starting pitchers, so it doesn’t permit a four-man rotation, which takes away some of the strategy of handling a pitching rotation over the course of a year and trades are limited to equal number of player trades and there’s no pulling up players from the minors or sending them back down. On the plus side, it does allow for the warming up of pitchers in the bullpen and allows for complex in-game decisions like double switches.

The create-a-player option is as deep as any you’ll find in any console baseball game around. The raw number of pitch styles and batting stances that are available are mind-boggling and all of the important attributes and details about the way the player looks are completely up to the user. The only weakness is that it’s not possible to create a player with perfect ratings in each category, unless there’s some yet to be released code or secret to it.

The stat tracking in All-Star Baseball is another of its many strong points, as just about every single important stat is kept and tracked throughout the regular season and not lost once the playoffs start. What’s most impressive is that the box scores for every single game played during a season, regardless of whether it was played by a human player or not, are saved and laid out exactly as you will find them in your morning newspaper. Player awards are also given for Cy Young, Rookie of the Year, MVP and others, and there’s a option called Games of Note that showcases all of the games over the course of the year that had a significant milestone reached, such as no-hitters and games where a player hit for the cycle.

Gameplay

The best thing about All-Star Baseball is that it completely backs up all of the stats and features with rock-solid gameplay that can appeal to both baseball purists and casual fans looking for a fun to play arcade-style baseball game. For instance, on the batting sides of things, when the game’s set to the Rookie difficulty level with the Easy Batting turned on (which turns off the cursor), users need only to worry about the timing of the swing to hit the ball and can expect a bevy of long balls.

And on the opposite end of the spectrum, if you jack up the difficulty level to All Star, the games are generally much tighter, and while still a bit homer heavy, the game’s have a more realistic feel to them and pitching duels will be a fairly common occurrence when top pitchers in the game face off.

And even though the frequency of homers are high when you use the Power swing over the Contact swing, players will find that the homers

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