After a particularly long and nasty winter, many gamers -- myself included -- look at the release of the year's baseball titles to be the official start of spring. The heck with seeing my first robin -- I'm more interested in orioles, blue jays, and cardinals. This year spring arrives with a shower of baseball titles for the Xbox. EA Sports' completely revamped MVP 2003 joins Sega Sports' World Series 2K3 and 3DO's High Heat Baseball 2004 on the shelf. Acclaim's All-Star Baseball has been around for a while and has consistently delivered, but can the aging franchise still bring the heat against the current lineup of baseball titles?
Instead of rebuilding from the ground up like EA Sports did with its graying Triple Play series, the folks at Acclaim decided to keep its franchise alive by adding on. And I'm not just talking about minor tweaks. A couple of the innovations in All-Star Baseball 2004 should become standard features in all baseball games by next season.
While none of this year's batch of baseball titles will let you go head-to-head online, ASB2004 does make some use of your Xbox Live subscription. One of the biggest hassles of playing in season or franchise mode is getting your team's roster up to date. Because of production schedules and shipping dates, team rosters in games are set weeks before the first pitch of opening day. As a result, just getting your team to resemble the one that'll take the field when the season starts can often mean a dozen or more transactions and tweaks.
If you're truly obsessive, however, and want to bring the entire league up to speed, you're potentially talking about hours of work. And, if you want to keep things accurate for the entire season, you might as well drop out of school or quit your job. While you may not be able to blow one by a guy a thousand miles away, with ASB2004 you'll be able to download current rosters throughout the season. Very cool!
Another sweet feature is the ability to save a game midway through it -- finally! Geez, I can TiVo nine-million episodes of The Simpsons every week and drink virtually carbohydrate-free beer, it's about time someone figured out how to make it possible to save a game in the fifth or sixth inning. If you've ever sat down to play a game and much later found yourself locked in a 2-2 17-inning nail-biter and very late for an appointment, you'll appreciate this feature. And thankfully, due to the built-in hard drive, saving is a snap. Both the PS2 and GameCube versions were big on load times and save times.
In addition to the regular lineup of modes and play options, a couple of interesting variations stick out. One is the scenario mode. Long a staple of football titles, this mode throws you into a situation based on an actual game and lets you determine the outcome. Derek Jeter introduces a segment about how ace reliever Mariano Rivera got shelled by the Indians in a save attempt last July. Your job is to replay the inning without making the same mistakes that Rivera did. All told, there are 21 different scenarios that will test whether you learned from the past or -- as game reviewer and philosopher George Santayana once said -- you're condemned to repeat it.
ASB2004's franchise mode also has a nifty twist. Here, you're given the option of giving Bud Selig the finger and fielding your own expansion team. Starting from scratch and being able to compete with the league's best with an expansion team is a great test of not only your fast-twitch skills, but your administrative savvy as well. Expansion teams generally are stocked with the castoffs and misfits from the other teams. Shrewd drafting and negotiating are the keys to successfully building a dynasty and packing the stands in, say, New Orleans or Austin.