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Baseball Edition 2000
- January 01, 2000 00:00 AM PST
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The players in Interplay's Baseball Edition 2000 look so good they're kind of scary. You can watch their muscles flex as they stretch the bat behind their head, warming up for their swing. Their jerseys shift as they twist their torsos and their head scratches are believable. (I didn't notice any other kind of scratching going on, but I'm sure that would have looked real as well.)
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You can lay a lot of this realism at the door of the Messiah technology licensed from Shiny Entertainment. As in Interplay's previous baseball game, VR Baseball 2000, this polygon-scaling technology allows coders to make the game as detailed as it can be on a given system.
Then again, it's weird that in a baseball game with over 700 animations, the one for the batter hitting the ball is poorly executed. Every swing, whether a grounder to third or a pop fly, looks like a bunt. And while each player is painstakingly rendered in true-to-life detail, all their swings look identical.
Unfortunately, a lot of these "then agains" turn up in Baseball Edition 2000.
For instance, the varying levels of difficulty are generally well implemented. "Rookie" makes it a cinch to pick up batting and fielding, Pro takes a respectable step up (you'll have to control the direction of your swing as well as the timing), and All-Star has the balls flying at you faster than you can blink.
But, then again, you have no way of knowing where a pitch may be headed other than eyeballing it.
The players do look real, as do the 3D modeled stadiums--all 30, plus Seattle's new Safeco Field and seven hidden stadiums from the say-hey-days of baseball--and their animated crowds. Apart from the swinging animation, it's fun to watch the players' unique routines as they approach the plate, stretching and spitting before their at-bat.
Then again, you need a 3D card to even run the game.
The sounds are a mixed bag. The crowd is great, heckling players they don't like and cheering heavily for plays they do. Then again, the PA announcer was barely audible, even after I turned the individual volume setting all the way up (although we had no problem hearing the generic play-by-play calls).
We had two installation choices: an 80MB minimum or a 650MB full. The CD crashed every time we tried to install the whole banana, so we made do with the minimum. The game played fine at first. But around the third inning, it started to slow way down any time more than a couple players were in motion. It made it a lot easier to hit the ball as it drifted to the plate like the one in that Intel commercial, but it was tough to field.
The game does feature a lot of creative extras, including a tournament mode in which players can draft their own all-star team and create a player to see how your guy stacks up against the pro--both in games and in the leader board in the Home Run Derby.
But, then again, these extras--and the realistically reproduced players and stadiums--can't keep Baseball Edition 2000 from being more than a minor league hit.
