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Im just sick when it comes to baseball. I routinely read
the daily box scores for even Pirates-Brewers games, and I truly believe that baseball is
a metaphor for just about everything, including and especially life. Such zealotry makes
me a crashing bore at parties and perversely demanding about video baseball games. Even if a games fun, little glitches in ball
physics or running errors that most folks quite healthily ignore will cause me pain
tremendous. So when Sega announced World Series Baseball 2K1 for the Dreamcast, I was
skeptical. All of the previous Sega Sports titles for the Dreamcast have offered stellar
graphics, pretty solid gameplay, and loads of fun. But each of them has also been
handicapped by some fairly significant problems. I expected about the same from WSB2K1. I was wrong. WSB2K1 offers uneven
graphics and wretched gameplay, and its hardly any fun at all. Even worse, for all
its occasional graphic splendor, it utterly fails to capture the feel of a
baseball game. While playing, I sometimes wondered if these guys had ever even been to a
game, or if they were just handed a rulebook and some video clips and told to have a go. Graphically, the game is a C in
the way that a student that gets nothing but Fs and As is a C. Sometimes the
game looks absolutely wonderful. The stadiums are lovingly rendered, players look very
sharp, and lighting effects are a marvel. The player animations can be amazingly smooth
and realistic. But there are problems as well. The crowd backgrounds, for example, are
just hideous. And those lovely animations not only cause some major slowdowns, they are
also very inconsistent. For example, heres a typical play: Batter hits slow roller
to left of the mound. Pitcher runs in place for several strides, apparently using
well-known cartoon stratagem for increasing velocity. When ball rolls close enough, he
runs over to it, executes a breathtaking pirouette, and fires the ball to first. In the
meantime, the batter is laboring robot-like up the baseline. Play Ball! And though some of
the animations are excellent, there seems to be a limited number of them. For example, Ive
never seen a routine popup to the infield. Every infield fly animation is a dramatic grab
on the outfield grass. And graphics are the games
strong point. Gameplay is awful. First of all, the game only allows you control over the
pitcher and batter. While you have a small amount of control over your runners, you cant
field at all. I suspect many players would use autofielding anyway, but its only a
real option if the AI fielders do a decent job on defense. In WSB2K1 they dont. Here are some examples of fielding bloopersshortstops
who watch slow rollers wend their way into the outfield, third basemen who dive to the
right for liners hit to their left, outfielders who cant be bothered to break in for
Texas Leaguers and often take the wrong angle on any liner to the outfield, allowing most
of them to roll to the wall. I was baffled by this behavior at first, since it didnt
resemble any Major League baseball game Id ever seen. But it seemed somehow
familiar, and then it struck methe fielders in WSB2K1 behave exactly like fat,
drunk, middle-aged guys playing ball at a company picnic. If you can imagine all the
players holding brewskis and nursing muscle pulls, WSB2K1 suddenly becomes
ultra-realistic. But this isnt Fat Drunk Guy Baseball 2K1 (theres a game that
awaits a-borning), and watching easy grounders consistently go for singles gets tiresome
in a hurry. The pitching and batting
interfaces arent much better. To pitch, you choose a pitch type by moving the analog
pad and hitting the A button. Unfortunately, the controls are very fiddly, and often youll
end up throwing a different pitch than the one you thought you selected. This is
especially annoying when youve set up a batter with fastballs for a changeup and the
game decides to throw yet another heater. Sayonara, baseball. After choosing what you hope
is the pitch you want, a power bar appears, and you select how much heat you want on the
pitch. At the same time, you use the analog pad to choose location. I could never get the
hang of this. The controls somehow seemed both sluggish and overly touchy, and most of my
pitches either went right down the middle or smack into a batters head. Look, Im
familiar with touch location modelsI play tons of High Heat on my
computer, and know it can take a while to get the hang of them. But WSB2K1s pitching
game is just plain sloppy. Likewise the hitting interface,
which is operated by holding the right trigger and releasing it for the swing while
selecting location with the analog pad. Actually,
this works pretty well once you get the hang of it, but its absolutely minimalist.
There are no provisions for different swing types (power, normal, contact) and you cant
move the batter in the box. And everyone seems to hit a lot like everyone else. But perhaps the worst gameplay
glitch is the AI baserunning. If the players field like middle-aged drunks, they run bases
like six-year olds on a sugar high. One of the first lessons we learn in baseball is not
to run to the next base on a fly ball, but rather to go half way, to scurry back to base,
to tag up. Apparently the players in this game missed that practice, because they
gleefully break for the next base regardless of how the balls hit, and are
constantly doubled and tripled up off routine fly balls. You have enough control over them
to call them back to base on some fly balls, but this is a sad baserunning model. |