7/25/2003 5:48:27 PM
World Series Baseball 2003 Xbox ReviewBy Mark Diller
You know you’re in trouble when you find yourself playing a baseball game that thinks the shortstop for the Texas Rangers is called “A Rod Rodriguez.” We can only presume that, in the game world, this redundantly named player is dating an actress/singer named J Lo Lopez.
“World Series Baseball 2003” has one big thing going for it: Sega crafted a deal with ESPN, so the game is littered with ESPN logos and the play-by-play is delivered by ESPN personalities. This adds a touch of realism to the game, and you should enjoy it. There’s very little realism to be found elsewhere in the game.
First, let’s go over the basics. This is a stats-driven baseball simulation, populated by all the teams and players currently on major league rosters. There are different modes of play, including the one-shot Quick Play, a Season mode in which you can serve as manager or general manager in guiding your team to glory, and a Franchise mode in which you can draft an entirely new team (composed, if you wish, of imaginary players) and manage them over several seasons. If that doesn’t hold your interest, you’ll also find different challenges to overcome. So far so good – these are the basic elements that we expect of modern baseball sims.
The controls are pretty much what you’d expect. When pitching you select a pitch type and then the desired location by using the left thumbstick and the A button in combination. Batting pretty much gets down to hitting the A button when you want to swing. Your baserunners advance or retreat by using the left or right triggers, while on defense you use the four buttons to say where a fielder should throw the ball. All pretty basic.
The graphics attempt to reach the level of “basic,” but without much success. On the strong side there are some nice player animations, with more accurate representations of fielding and throwing motions than you’ll see in other games, but these few strong points don’t outweigh the many graphical flaws. For instance, it’s now commonplace to see sports titles that feature realistic player modeling, but you won’t find it here. “World Series Baseball” features players that don’t look anything like their real-life counterparts; the hair color is often wrong, the faces only vaguely resemble what they’re supposed to look like, and the designers apparently only created a few body models because many players have tiny heads perched on top of big, burly bodies. In particular there’s one graphical “feature” that backfires badly: in close-up a player’s face twitches and twists around, which was intended to simulate accurate facial movement, but the actual effect is to make the player look like a rat-man sniffing for cheese. It’s downright disturbing. The stadium interiors are equally unimpressive: everything looks like it’s made out of plastic and foam rubber, even the natural grass, and there are shadow effects that you’d never see in a real stadium. And while I commend the designers for taking the time to add birds flitting through the air, someone should remind them that you don’t usually see birds flying overhead during night games (unless those things are actually supposed to be bats).
The sound has similar flaws. At first I thought I was in for a treat when I heard fans taunting the players, but then I realized how few taunts there were. “Hey Ichiro, why don’t you take up cricket?!” was amusing the first couple of times, but it got old in a hurry. When the fans aren’t taunting opposing players, they have a strange tendency to cheer loudly when a pitch is called a ball. The ESPN commentary was only occasionally appropriate to the action on the field – they talk at length about some player who isn’t hitting or pitching, and then a drive will go to the wall but the play-by-play guy will calmly announce, “It drops in for a hit.” The worst sin of all, though, is the announcers completely ignore runs. A hit that scores a run draws (dull) comments about the hit but nothing about the run – in my experience, the “World Series Baseball” commentators never notice that a run has scored unless it comes on a home run. As far as I’m concerned that’s just bad programming. And don’t even get me started on the PA system announcing that “A Rod Rodriguez” is coming to bat – did the designers actually think A Rod is his first name, or was it just a matter of bad quality control?
Still, a game that looks and sounds unimpressive could be fun if it features strong statistical modeling of the game. Unfortunately “World Series Baseball” falls flat here as well. The game you’ll see on your Xbox simply doesn’t look much like the real thing. There are far too many strikeouts in simulated games – it’s not unusual to see two starting pitchers combine for more than twenty K’s – and there are way too many lineouts to the infield as well. That’s a play you might see once or twice in a real game, but it comes up nearly every inning in this simulation. Outfielders will often badly misplay a ground ball so that it rolls to the wall, but they get away with their fielding blunders because baserunners almost never try to advance from first to third. And then, when the game is completed, you might be treated to the sight of the box score listing the same pitcher receiving the win and the save – a statistical impossibility. As with the A Rod fiasco, this suggests that either the design team doesn’t know squat about baseball, or they didn’t take the time to correct errors in their programming. Neither speaks well for the level of effort that they put into this title.
The best I can say about “World Series Baseball” is that it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye. It’s conceivable that you might have fun playing the game, but why would you want to when there are much better baseball games on the market? Acclaim’s “All-Star Baseball 2004” has flaws of its own but still manages to beat this game in nearly every category. “World Series Baseball” isn’t ready for the majors.
Ratings (1-10):
Graphics: 6. Individual points of excellence cannot overcome serious shortcomings overall.
Sound: 7. A decent effort torpedoed by repetitious dialogue and one incredible blunder.
Gameplay: 8. The mechanics are solid.
Story: N/A
Replayability: 7. The most depth of experience is to be found in the Franchise mode.
Overall: 7. We might have been excited about this title a few years ago, but today it can’t stand up to the competition.
World Series Baseball 2003 Xbox Review
