Interplay Sports Baseball Edition 2000

Pros • outstanding animations • customizable difficulty settings • accurate physics • slick graphics	Cons • weird stat reporting • "You swing like a girl!" • everybody looks like Michael Jackson • terrible commentating • "take the easy out" • inadequate documentation • shallow managerial modes • plays too slowly
Bottom Line They don't quite have what it takes to win the division, but Interplay is right in the wild card race with this title. Interplay Sports Baseball 2000 betrays by its poor season mode that it is an arcade game, not a simulation. The physics, pitching interface, player graphics and animations are better than Triple Play 2000. Unfortunately, this attempt at arcade play is still hamstrung by the snail's pace of the game. All of the animations are great. Pitchers adjusting their caps, going for the rosin bag or shaking out their shoulders is cool. Batters digging into the batter's box is also great, but it takes too long. When I call a pitch, I want the pitcher to throw it, not adjust his cup, turn around three times and spit. The animations can be turned off, but still, the batters and pitchers take their sweet time getting set for each at bat. I end up pounding on the buttons in frustration, trying to cut to the action. When it comes right down to it, this slow pace is what spoiled, for me, an otherwise very good arcade style baseball game. This young franchise is loaded with talent and, with a little work in the off season, ought to be a real contender in upcoming years.

Interplay Sports Baseball Edition 2000 is a much improved version of VR Baseball 2000. It doesn't quite have what it takes to win the division, but Interplay is right in the wild card race with this title.

Ooooh Pretty!

Because this game uses the 3D engine from Messiah and requires a 3D card for play, the obvious place to begin is with the graphics. Interplay Sports have done a great job taking the disturbing out of VR Baseball 2000 and keeping the beautiful. You can still pick out player's sliding pants and forearm muscles, but their legs are now attached and the players move like humans, even if they still all eerily resemble Michael Jackson. The ball park stadiums are much improved and the crowd textures are amazing. They even shift and move like an active, cheering crowd. It can be a little distracting at the plate. The most spectacular part of the game is the animations. Even the mundane plays like throwing a ball or the first baseman's stretch are made spectacular by the accuracy of the player movements. On the difficult plays, the animations are downright amazing. Diving grabs, fielders sliding under fly balls, shortstops making backhanded stabs and leaping into the air to throw across their bodies to first, second basemen dragging their foot across the bag and leaping the sliding base runner to throw to first and turn the double, these plays are fabulous and had me wishing for a replay function so I could build a hi-lite reel. The camera work that shifts to capture the action is also very good, but not up to the broadcast views of Triple Play 2000. Unfortunately, there is one fatal flaw in the animations of Interplay Sports Baseball Edition 2000. That flaw is batting.

You Swing Like A Girl!

Ever had a coach, parent, adversary yell that at you? They might as well have taunted, "You swing like someone out of Interplay Sports Baseball!" It hurts my eyes and throws off my timing. Just about ruins the game for me, it does. Rather than coordinating their joints and swinging the bat like an athlete, the modeled players of this game wave their backsides behind them and flail the bat from the elbows and wrists.

The unfortunate animation is, ...well, unfortunate considering that the pitching / batting confrontation of Interplay Sports Baseball is otherwise very good. The pitcher chooses from four pitches (three of which are the same for every pitcher) and selects a location. Then, with a second input, the pitcher selects the speed of the pitch (fast, medium, slow) and refines the location. Pitchers hit or miss the exactly selected locations depending on their skill with the selected pitch and their fatigue status. The control is fantastic and the one PC baseball interface that allows players to feel like the pitcher rather than the back catcher.

There are two batting modes, one is a pure timing system like Triple Play and the other is a much more difficult timing and location matching system like that of High Heat Baseball. The game is very customizable, so that you can play with fast or slow pitches and either style of batting. The best of both worlds. Batters have a contact and a power swing as well as bunt, but are unable to check a swing. The batting system is taken a little bit farther for the home run derbies. In home run derbies, besides matching the timing, the length of time that the swing button is depressed also effects whether the resulting hit is short, a towering pop fly or a massive home run. I don't think it does, but I am unable to determine for certain if that same rule applies to normal batting. The baseball physics are very accurate and the game accurately models foul balls (there are more of them in this game than any other), line drives to the gaps (result in doubles), slow rollers in the infield (close plays at first) and so on.

The fielding options are also superb. There is a sliding scale of fielding assists that effects how much of a jump towards the ball fielders take before the player has to take over. The fielding AI is very good, although the computer has a tendency to try for the difficult force third out at second or third base instead of taking the easy one at first.

Presentation

Interplay Sports Baseball maintains the good crowd effects, public announcer and in game music. The cheesy umpire is gone and replaced by a believable one. Unfortunately, Interplay has chosen, like everyone else, to go with a commentator. They haven't shelled out for a real commentator and the commentary is so much inferior to other games that it was better off without one. A quick illustration is that the commentator in his awful California Valley voice, calls every pitch out of the strike zone, "outside." Evidently he has never heard of pitching inside.

There are some interface difficulties. Trying to end a season and get to the playoffs can be frustrating until you figure out that you have to find the very last game of the season by flipping through all of the teams to find out who has a game on the last day. Setting up a tournament (which is a fun additional play mode), is infuriating. It took me over twenty minutes to figure out how to assign teams to human players, and that was with the manual, which is obviously inadequate, in hand. The game does silly things like list season leading ERAs backwards. It lists the highest first and the list runs out long before you get anywhere near the league leaders.

The season simulation mode remains inadequate, although fast. (Why does it take other games so long to simulate games?) Again, the only fun I had with it was to trade all of the all stars onto two teams (there is no trading AI and you can make any trades you want, which is fun) to test out how well they did and, like in VR Baseball 2000, neither all star team won the pennant. One didn't even win their division (Maybe that is why this game can simulate seasons so fast, it seems as random as it does simulated).

Too Slow!

Interplay Sports Baseball 2000 betrays by its poor season mode that it is an arcade game, not a simulation. The physics, pitching interface, player graphics and animations are better than Triple Play 2000. Unfortunately, this attempt at arcade play is still hamstrung by the snail's pace of the game. All of the animations are great. Pitchers adjusting their caps, going for the rosin bag or shaking out their shoulders is cool. Batters digging into the batter's box is also great, but it takes too long. When I call a pitch, I want the pitcher to throw it, not adjust his cup, turn around three times and spit. The animations can be turned off, but still, the batters and pitchers take their sweet time getting set for each at bat. I end up pounding on the buttons in frustration, trying to cut to the action. When it comes right down to it, this slow pace is what spoiled, for me, an otherwise very good arcade style baseball game. This young franchise is loaded with talent and, with a little work in the off season, ought to be a real contender in upcoming years.

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