Review NaN of 8
, from Massachusetts
Price Paid:
$35.00
from Electronics Boutique Summary:
First off, I have to say this: I am a huge, huge, HUGE Red Sox fan. I wear my Red Sox hat everywhere, I have a Fenway Park T-shirt, I despise the Yankees - yep, I love the BoSox. In fact, I love baseball in general, and I'll watch a game when it's on regardless of who's playing. But I never really got into baseball video games - after all, I didn't really get into baseball until a few years ago, and as you can guess, I missed out on classics like Ken Griffey Jr.'s Winning Run. Now, just recently, I was getting ready for a long class trip - as in week-long, with very lengthy bus rides. I decided I needed a new GBA game, something I can use to pass the time. I read reviews, did research, and finally decided upon Sega and THQ's Baseball Advance.
The Game Boy systems have apparently never really been known for having high-quality baseball games. In fact, I really don't know of that many portable baseball games at all, let alone good ones. But with Baseball Advance, this should change dramatically, because BA is one of the most fun games I've ever played, of any kind, on any system. It's so easy to pick up and play that anyone with a basic knowledge of the game can get right into it.
BA features all 30 MLB teams and their 2001 rosters (yes, that means the Giambi brothers and Johnny Damon are still in Oakland, Carl Everett's still with the Red Sox, Chuck Knoblauch is still a Yankee, etc.), so you can play along as your favorite team, whether it's the Mariners or the (ewww) Devil Rays. You also get four major league ballparks, two from each league: San Francisco's Pac Bell Park (featured on the game's cover), Chicago's Wrigley Field, Boston's Fenway Park, and Seattle's Safeco Field. And believe it or not, they are, in fact, four different ballparks (see Gameplay). You also have four modes of play: Exhibition (play a single game with any two teams, at any ballpark, from 1-9 innings); Season (take your favorite team, or just any team you want, through the full 162-game season, following their real 2001 schedule, including an All-Star Game, interleague play, and playoffs); Playoffs (skip the season and put your team into the offseason against other randomly selected teams and wild cards from each division); and the All-Star Game (just what it sounds like - note that the All-Star teams are the real 2001 teams, and commissioner Bud Selig will NOT end it in a tie). There are also four difficulty levels, but I'll get to that later.
The sheer amount of data in BA is amazing in itself. You have all the players from each team's rosters, of course, and each also has their own stats, in four offensive categories (corresponding to their actual 2001 stats), plus the pitchers have three categories of their own for, well, pitching. I'll break down the categories in Gameplay, but needless to say, this game has a LOT of info for a tiny cartridge (not quite as impressive to me as all the stuff they packed into Golden Sun, but still quite amazing).
BA has, hands-down, THE best batter-pitcher interface I've ever seen, though I haven't played every baseball game (put it this way: it's better than All-Star Baseball 2003's, and I really like THAT interface...). I'll get to that in gameplay. The batting/pitching graphics are amazing - they look better than almost anything I've seen on a SNES! The fielding graphics, on the other hand, are decent, at best, but I'll get to that in Graphics. As for sound, well, nothing special here, but it's a baseball game! It doesn't need anything extravagant!
The replay value is definitely here. Season mode's 162 games should take you a very, very long time to complete - heck, Playoffs mode takes a good amount of time to complete, too. Each game, obviously, goes by quicker than a real baseball game, and it shouldn't take mode than 10-20 minutes to play a game. But the number of games to play adds up quickly. And even when you finish a season, you can always go back any play through again with a new team on a harder difficulty. For example, when I finished with my Red Sox on "veteran", the second-easiest of the four levels, I started over with the Dodgers on "all-star", the next toughest level. I plan to play through a third time, perhaps with the Twins, on "legend", the top difficulty level. Each team plays a bit differently, but again, check out the Gameplay section for more.
Now, of course, no game is perfect, and despite all the pros of BA, there are still quite a few cons. First of all, the computer AI is far from perfect, especially on the lower difficulty levels (for example, an outfield running AWAY from a fly ball). I suppose this is to make it easier for new players to succeed, but I think it makes the game too easy, even then, especially with the sharp increase in difficulty going to the higher two difficulty levels, where outfielders literally never make errors. Also, the four stadiums are nice, but it would really be great for each team to have their own ballparks instead of using a predetermined park as their home (the Devil Rays don't play home games at Pac Bell Park; in fact, Tropicana Field is almost the complete opposite of Pac Bell). I realize that it would take even more cartridge space to do so, but I think it could be done. In addition, there are no weather changes. Ever. It would be nice to see games rained out and doubleheaders played to make them up in Season mode, and maybe even have the covered or retractable-roof stadiums (Safeco, Metrodome, SkyDome, Bank One, etc.) not have rainouts, obviously.
Another missing feature is trading. There are no trades at all; everyone stays put on their respective teams. If trades could be made, you could keep up with all the real life trades (Bartolo Colon to Montreal, Cliff Floyd to Boston, Scott Rolen to St. Louis, etc.). You could also get offers during a season from other teams and the choice of whether or not to trade a player could be a big part of your strategy as a manager. Speaking of which, there are also far too few injuries. I hate to sound sadistic, but players don't get injured enough - I've seen two injuries the entire time I've had the game, and both were with my Red Sox! (I'm 120 games into my Dodgers season right now, injury-free.) Part of managing a team is being able to keep your team going when a big player is out with, say, a strained hamstring. As it is, you barely ever have to deal with that. One more minor thing overlooked is the double-switch, in non-DH games (swapping out the pitcher and a batter for new ones in reversed spots so the pitcher's spot in the batting order is moved above the current batter's spot, removing the need for a pinch-hitter and then another new pitcher - it's a complicated rule, go look it up somewhere if you're not familiar with it). You simply can't do it. Then again, the pitchers aren't as horrible at the plate in this game as they are in real life, though they are at a disadvantage. The double-switch option would be nice to have.
There's also one minor gripe I have about errors - they just don't happen enough. A throw to an infielder NEVER gets botched, ever. There are no high throws or anything. All errors involve players dropping fly balls. And even these don't happen often enough to be realistic. I guess the arcadey element of the game overrides the sim part in this aspect. Oh well, I guess the errors are kinda obnoxious in the rare event that they do happen...
Finally, the biggest gap is - you guessed it - lack of link support. That's right - this is a one-player affair. Now, maybe there's no two-player mode because the batter/pitcher system may not work well with two human players. Maybe they just couldn't fit it in. But whatever the case, it's a big part of sports games and should definitely be in there if and when a Baseball Advance 2003 comes out.
One thing you may want to note, too, is that the game doesn't actually explain the rules of baseball to you, you're just expected to know them. Most of the stuff is very basic - just search the Internet if you're not sure exactly how the game works. Rules you'll want to know about include force outs (if a runner HAS to go to a base because another runner is coming to occupy theirs, the baseman only has to tag the base; if the runner is not required to go to that base, HE must be tagged out, not the base) and infield flies (if a pop fly can be caught without extra effort and there are runners out, the batter is automatically called out and the ball is dead - this is to prevent infielders from letting the ball drop to set up a cheap double play). Don't worry about more advanced rules, like balks, because those will not come into play here. But just be aware of basic baseball rules.
One last gripe I have is the difficulty of the game. There are four available modes: Rookie, Veteran, All-Star, and Legend. You may as well call them easy, medium, hard, and expert. The mode affects the size of your players' batting zones, the quality of opposing pitching and batting, and the speed at which the opposing fielders play in the ball. The problem is that the game may be a bit TOO intuitive - that is, you begin to get better and better, and you may get too good too soon - in other words, don't start a season on Rookie or Veteran, it'll get too easy too quick, and you'll find yourselves in the situation the real-life Atlanta Braves are in right now (they have practically a 20-game lead on everyone else in the division), where you don't have any pressure on you to make the playoffs. On the other hand, if you start off playing the higher levels, you'll find yourself losing bad and often. I suggest easing in with a few Novice-level exhibitions, a Veteran-level Playoffs run, then go for the full season on at least All-Star. It's not too much of a concern, but I got stuck halfway through a Novice-level season, and Manny Ramirez had over 100 homers BEFORE the all-star break. That's just wrong. :) Not to take anything away from the game, it's still fun setting every offensive record by midseason, but the lower difficulties just don't work in Season mode.
But, in the end, Baseball Advance is a very impressive first effort by Sega and THQ on the GBA, especially when the other baseball titles on it are not exactly fantastic. Despite its shortcomings, it still provides a fantastic game of baseball that will please most hardcore fans without alienating itself from the more casual MLB crowd. If you like baseball at all, and/or you want to pick up a long-lasting, high-quality game to take on the road with you, definitely check out this one. Baseball Advance: one part sim, one part arcade, all parts a blast to play! Now, time to wait for next year's installment...
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