Way back ... to the wall ... going ... going ...
Written: Apr 21 '03 (Updated Apr 21 '03)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: ahead of its time, fun, addictive
Cons: canned announcing, pitch placement is a little off, errors are unrealistic, bad season stat tracking
The Bottom Line: This is probably one of the best and most innovative baseball video games ever to appear on a 16 bit system.
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| kjell1979's Full Review: World Series Baseball for Sega Genesis |
Out of the Batter's Box and Into Your Home
I've had many baseball video games in my lifetime: the very first Hardball for the PC, Baseball for Gameboy, Bases Loaded 2 for the Nintendo, to MVP Baseball for PS2. However, none of them were as innovative as World Series Baseball for Genesis. At first glance, this game looked to be the baseball version of Sega's awful "sports talk" franchise. Although many might disagree, it’s my belief that sports video game announcing was probably the worst innovation in sports video game history. I won't get into it because it's another topic for another time, but I'll leave you with this thought. Would you rather attend a sporting event, or watch it on TV where the announcing crew began to repeat themselves 1/3 of the way into the game? Turn off the announcing and you’ll see where I’m coming from.
The innovative feature in this game that set the standard for baseball video game today was the catcher's view. From there you could see how certain pitches moved and how to react to them. Before this game, I had no idea how to identify a slider from a curveball in real life, let alone while watching the game on TV. Since I could see how the pitches moved, I began recognize them more accurately. Not since Tecmo Super Bowl had a sports video game enhanced my experience of watching a sport as World Series Baseball. Add this feature in with a good all around baseball game with many realistic features and great game play and Sega has the start of a great video game series on its hands.
The Features
In addition to the batter's box view, the game was very complete for its time. You could bunt, steal bases, hit and run. You had the option of warming up your relievers in the bullpen or bring them in cold and take your chances against hitters that smell blood. Warming up your bullpen isn't even in MVP Baseball 2003!
Each pitcher has 3 pitches assigned to him, as well as a certain amount of stamina points. Starting pitchers have 250 stamina points, middle relievers have 175 stamina points, setup men and closers each have 80 stamina points. The different pitches found in the game include: fastballs, curveballs, sliders, changeups, splitters, and knuckleballs. These pitches can be thrown at a low, medium or fast speeds. The faster the pitch, the more stamina it expends. Unfortunately every curveball looks the same from one pitcher to the next. Pitcher windups are also generic as well as batter stances and swings. Since you can only see a small portion of the batter, it doesn't detract too much from the game.
You have the option of playing an exhibition game, a season, or homerun derby. Exhibition games are the type of mode you want if you just want to play one game and are a staple of sports video games going back to the early 90's. You can pit any two teams in the game against each other. You can even face yourself.
If you choose season mode you have the option of picking how many games there are in the season. You can go as high as the full 162 games or as low as 13, where there are about 3 other choices in between (26, 52, and 81 I believe). Once you choose your team, you must stick with that same team or start the season over. This is a shame, especially since you can make a 162 game season interesting if you can move from team to team. At the end of each season game you can review the box score for that game and see the league leaders section. The stats are your typical league leader stats: at-bats, steals, hits, doubles, triples, homeruns, average, slugging %, wins, saves, earned run average, winning %, complete games, shutouts, strikeouts and appearances. Unfortunately, stat calculations are just for your league. That is, the game doesn't allow you to see how you're doing with respect to the entire major league just the American or National league. Even worse the stats aren't calculated correctly. Frequently, I see pitchers with ERA in the 5s, 6s and even 7s in the league leaders section. However, my starting pitcher might have an ERA around 2 or 3 and not be listed. This is a huge hole in the game that should have been fixed. Other games in the Tecmo sports series effectively used stats to track your season progress and how you're doing with respect to the rest of the league. Here, you can't check your stats until the game is over. Heck, you can't even check the standings until your game is over. The season mode is just too linear. It doesn't allow you to look at your stats, schedule or the standings whenever you want. One other minor omission from the season mode is the lack of trades.
Homerun derby plays by the typical set of rules. You have to hit as many homeruns as you can before you get 9 outs. An out is anytime your bat hits the ball and it's not a home run. Foul balls or fair non-homeruns are considered outs.
Game play
Playing the games is what's really fun. Games last about an hour, which is a little on the long side, but they can go faster during pitcher duels. Players have different abilities in this game. For instance, Mark McGwire can hit the ball a mile, but doesn't get many hits in general. However, Tony Gwynn gets a ton of hits, but not a lot of homeruns. Likewise, John Kruk is a lot slower on the basepaths than Kenny Lofton. What's great is that you don't know what their exact abilities are. All you have available in the game are their career stats. I like this because it really allows a decent amount of speculation and debate as to who is better instead of a numerical rating which states clearly that Griffey can hit homeruns better than McGwire. It might be disappointing to see your favorite player numerically inferior to his rival, kind of like a Nomar versus Jeter debate. Such ratings are subjective anyway and keeping it hidden from everyone who plays the game, help to fuel these debates that makes sports fun.
While pitching, you move your baseball cursor to the area where you want your pitch to hit the catcher's glove. The critical part is where it hits the catcher's glove, not where it crosses the plate. This is something it took me a while to find out and it's a big drawback to the game. You have your strike zone clearly printed on the screen, however if you place your ball cursor inside it, it will not necessarily be a strike. Curveballs and sliders are especially notorious for this since they have a lot of movement. There are three difficulty settings for pitching (actually they effect batting more than anything) and they all involve pitch speeds. In easy mode, the pitches will be thrown with a velocity in the 70's where fastballs top out at a max speed of 78 miles per hour. The medium bumps everything up by 10 miles per hour so that most pitches are clocked in the 80's. As you probably have figured out, the hard difficulty level puts most pitches in the 90's and timing starts to become a major factor when hitting.
You have several options when batting. You have the option of hitting for contact, normally or for power. Contact is used primarily when you want to move a runner into scoring position and don’t want to strike out. Normal is, as you’d probably guessed, a normal swing. The power option is used when you want to swing for the fences, however you’re also more likely to miss the ball. There are three difficulty settings involved with the batting process. In easy mode, there is no cursor. You simply swing and your bat automatically adjusts to where the ball is headed. If you time your swing correctly, you'll probably hit a home run. In medium mode, you have a cursor roughly 1/4 the size of the entire strike zone. If you hit the ball when it goes through the cursor, it'll likely be a solid hit, if not a home run. You must move the cursor while the pitch is in the air to adjust to it. I'm not a big fan of hitting cursors, but it does add more excitement to the game for many people. I'm beginning to warm up to the idea the more I use it. In hard mode you still have the batting cursor, only it's much smaller. It's roughly the size of the ball cursor, which is about 1/20th the size of the strike zone. If you get the ball in there though, it's a good chance you'll get a hit, but it's much harder, especially when the pitch speeds are high. For a reasonable difficulty level, I would assign a value on each mode 1 being easy, 2 being medium and 3 being hard. If you add up the pitch speed difficulty and the batting difficulty, a good value is 4.
Multiplayer is a little bit problematic, however the pitch location does help to solve this problem. If you're playing against a friend, you can see where he's going to pitch and visa versa. This makes for a very frustrating afternoon because everyone knows where the ball is headed; you just have to be ready to hit it. The good part is, since the cursor doesn't necessarily indicate where the ball is going to cross the plate, the batter would still wonder if it's going to be a strike or not. However, once everyone is familiar with the different pitches, then you could tell very quickly where to position your batting cursor and also whether to swing or not. Curveballs and sliders are very prevalent in these games. Also, a good rule is to use the smallest batting cursor on this mode. It helps to even things out a bit.
Stealing bases is all related to pitch speed in this game. If you swing or if the ball is low, it plays no part in the game. Having the pitch speed on easy mode means everyone in the game can steal second if you get a good jump. The medium pitch speed offers the greatest chance of stealing. However, even the fastest players in the game cannot steal 3rd even on the slowest pitch speeds. This is a little annoying, but it's something you have to live with in the game.
Fielding is done well, though it's not balanced with regards to errors. One of the biggest problems that plague many baseball video games is the problem with fielding. You want to be able to get a jump on getting your fielders to the ball, but how can you do that when transitioning from the batter/pitcher view to the field? Also, you can't see the entire field at once, so how do you know where to go. Computer controlled players help out with this, but they're prone to making errors in judgment as well. World Series Baseball allows you to take control of the nearest fielder at any point during the play. This allows you to make minor adjustments to the player's rout. There's also a dive and jump button to make better plays on the field as well. One of the biggest problems in this game with regards to fielding is the amount of errors you get in the field. This is made even worse by the fact that the computer makes an error once every 50 games. The amount of errors you make are the same type of ones each time. It's usually a grounder that gets through the infield and the ball ricochets off the outfielder and to the wall. This usually ends up being a triple. It doesn't matter whether you control the outfielder or not, it just happens. It turns out that the amount of errors in the game still remains less than in real Major League games, but these type of errors don't happen as often or so predictably. You almost never get any throwing errors, which is the most common error you see. Mostly throwing from shortstop or third to first base. It's another small annoyance in the game, but it's not too bad in the overall scheme of things.
Roundup
The graphics are very decent for this era and platform. They could be a little less grainy, but that was cleaned up in later versions of the game. There were many graphical shortcuts as well as cut and paste jobs. This is with the batter appearances, and the different sprites are generic. It would be nice to see a larger sprite chugging around the base paths for John Kruk. It would be a better use for the room and development efforts than the sports talk feature.
Which brings me to music and sound. The sounds are great for the most part. Crowd cheering is done well, though I haven't played a game where the crowd noise is high in the 9th inning of a close game. The sports talk is very annoying. There is a campy quality, which has a nostalgic feel for me, but for others who are new to the series it isn't all that redeeming. It seems as if the announcer has a bunch of canned words and phrases that are pasted together to call a play. The calls are relatively accurate even by today’s standards. It's just that the different calls do not vary too much. There is an umpire who calls balls and strikes as well. He's ok, though generic and annoying after a while. The only music in the game is the menu music. It's good, but nothing to write home about.
The game play is pretty good, but falls slightly short of being an all time great. Minor inconsistencies in trying to recreate the feel of the game create some game play balance issues like stealing bases and fielding errors. Overall it's a fun game and can hold your attention for months. Games are too long to play more than one at a time. Occasionally I can squeeze in two, but that sometimes makes me put down the game for a week afterwards.
The replay value is also great. A better statistic-tracking engine could have been used to help a player through an entire 162 game seasons. Otherwise, game strategy really plays a huge part in making games close and fun. Ultimately these things bring you back for more. The game can get boring and repetitive in general after a couple weeks just due to some inherent repetition. However, the game is fun and just thinking about it makes me want to stop writing this and starting playing it now.
The controls are great. They respond well and are well placed. You don't need too many buttons for baseball games in general. If there were more buttons it would be nice to assign each button to a certain base to throw to. That's a good innovation that wasn't possible on this platform. Perhaps they should have made that an option using the 6-button controller. Just an idea, but it doesn't ruin the game by any stretch of the imagination.
Final Thoughts
Overall this game is great. Not perfect, but it's certainly a game that any sports fan should check out. It's a great game to help teach a baseball newcomer the game. The game has a simple interface and can be as simple or complicated as you want it to be. The computer employs good strategy most of the time so it's something that you can learn from.
EDIT
One thing I forgot to mention was that all the major league parks are there (as of 1994) and recreated as best as possible. They look mostly alike when you're fielding, with the exception of the dimensions of the park.
Recommended:
Yes
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kjell1979
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Location: Oxford, Mass
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