All Star Baseball 2005
At the top of the lineup for the last couple years, can ASB fend of EA’s MVP?
Tags: All Star Baseball 2005 Categories: PS2 Reviews, Reviews
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Jun 15th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| All Star Baseball 2005 (title page) | 1-4 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Sports | Yes | ||
Among the major players, there’s a three-way race for baseball dominance this year. That’s one less than in previous years, primarily due to 3DO’s absence from the field following the company’s troubles that resulted in the MIA status of High Heat Baseball… and anything else they had planned to release.
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The battle for hardball fans’ hearts has been a two-way race recently, with some preferring High Heat and others preferring Acclaim’s All-Star Baseball franchise. That’s changed this year, with EA rebounding in a big way by mostly completing a makeover of their baseball franchise that began last year with the introduction of MVP Baseball and continues this year with some much-needed refinements.
So, how is one-time king-of-the-hill, All-Star Baseball, faring this year?
Mostly, pretty well. Always a franchise steeped in a genuine love of the game reflected in the game’s design and extras, the 2005 edition of ASB is more of the same with several upgrades … but the unforeseen improvements of EA’s MVP did catch ASB napping on the mound in some regards.
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One of the best elements of ASB 2005 is the graphics; from a visual standpoint, the game is head-and-shoulders above both MVP and ESPN. While the players are not exactly photorealistic, they are usually recognizable and are generally much more detailed and higher-resolution than the player models in MVP or ESPN. Stadiums are rendered in loving detail and in a surprise feature, there are not only historic but future stadiums rendered into the game.
Future stadiums? Yup! The folks at Acclaim must be on major league baseball’s payroll or something because proposed future stadiums, such as the retractable-roof stadium proposed for the Twins to replace the Metrodome (though the issue remains stalled at the Minnesota state legislature) appears exclusively in ASB 2005, based off the proposed design specs the Twins presented to the Minnesota legislature less than a year ago. Including that staduim in ASB 2005? How’s that for whetting the public appetite for a new Twins stadium? Other proposed-but-not-built-yet stadiums also appear.
The on-screen presentation is pretty nifty, too. More details appear on the standard “pitching” or “at bat” screen than appears in either MVP or ESPN, making more information available to you consistently. There’s even a caption-feature that makes the commentators’ dialog visible to you if you’re playing with the sound down low during dorm quiet hours at college or some other situation. I can foresee some people complaining the screen is cluttered, but personally I didn’t feel it was cluttered; as much information as there was, it was all well-organized.
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As for the controls, the infamous “batting cursor” is back… or not! It’s your choice in ASB 2005, which gives you a handful of options to pick from when determining how you want to play the game. You can have a batting cursor or use an MVP-style batting interface or try out the analog-stick batting control. It’s up to you.
ASB still has the pitchers and their pitches down more accurately than just about any other baseball sim out there, and the subtle differences of a changeup versus a circle change are more noticeable while remaining sim-style realistic.
It should also be mentioned that ASB 2005 has the most effective-to-control bunt system of any of this year’s games, allowing you not only to prepare for the bunt, but direct it as well.
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Thom Brennaman and Steve Lyons return on commentary and are two of the most solid play-by-play teams in videogame baseball; unfortunately, MVP’s voicework, while less sparkly, was so seemless that it makes the patchwork sound on ASB really obvious. To wit:
“Welcome to the … Minnesota Twins! Versus the … Toronto Blue Jays!”
The pauses for customization are blindingly-obvious and a bit off-putting after a while. Also, if you skip video segments like players coming to bat, it tends to throw the commentary way off; and the voicework often lags behind the play on the field to a noticeable degree. Too bad; Brenneman and Lyons deserve better.
However, one nice touch is this: Oscar Soria, Spanish announcer for the Arizona Diamondbacks, has been added to the announce team this year, doing broadcast commentary in Spanish, accessible via the SAP feature on your TV or monitor; a thoughtful nod to multilingual baseball fans!
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Now let’s get into the meat of ASB 2005; the franchise mode!
To start: a tip of the hat to Acclaim for reading videogame reviews; this year’s game for the first time includes all three levels of minor league squads: A, AA and AAA. A personal gripe of mine in last year’s review was that the franchise included only AAA and AA squads; and ASB 2005 is the only baseball game to include all three minor-league levels in their game. That’s responding to feedback, baby!
Unfortunately, the introduction of playable minor-league teams by EA’s MVP franchise makes ASB’s otherwise commendable upgrade seem a step too short. In MVP, there may only be two levels of minor-league teams, but they have full rosters and you can play their game schedule as well as the major league teams’ schedule. Doing so results in quicker improvement of those minor leaguers.
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By contrast, while ASB 2005 has all three levels of the minors, ultimately, they are just three rosters of extra players that you don’t do much with during the season and whose improvement is handled invisibly, with no games or schedule or anything remotely sim-like. Even worse, the minor league teams are not even full rosters; you only get 10 players per minor league roster and it doesn’t need to be balanced. Room for improvement here.
This is an area that will lay down the gauntlet for next year’s edition of ASB, if Acclaim hopes to keep pace with EA or regain the lead.
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Still, Acclaim is not without its own one-upsmanship qualities. For example, while most people sim through the spring training season, ASB give you a reason to play through those games; depending on playing time and achievements in those preseason games, players collect “player improvement” points; the more they do, the more they play, the more points they collect; the more points they collect, the more you can offset “post-season” digression of skills in aging players or ramp up a rookie’s abilities for a quicker major-league debut. Got a pitcher with only two or three effective pitches? You can, at the end of the spring training season, spend player improvement points to add another pitch to his arsenal or make his fastball more effective. This captures the concept of the value of players showing up for spring training and makes the games suddenly important to play rather than sim past.
Also, Acclaim’s game loves the sport enough to get the details right; for example, the rookie draft? Admittedly, major league baseball’s draft is FAR more complicated than any other sport’s, since it involves high school seniors as well as college prospects, but both ESPN and MVP “package” the draft as part of an off-season mini-game. Only ASB 2005 “gets it right,” placing the rookie draft in early June, as part of your season, right where it belongs.
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And while ASB still uses the hated “point system” for player salary, rather than US dollars (a sin MVP and ESPN are guilty of as well), ASB’s salary cap is realistically tied to team performance, the city you play in and, to an extent, the rep of the real-life owners. Win the World Series and you’re likely to see your budget for the next season rise a bit; underperform and you may see your budget cut, meaning letting expensive veterans go to free agency and either signing less-spendy free agents to fill the gap, or promoting from your minor-league system.
But at least in ASB 2005, things happen when they are supposed to happen and are not just all rolled into one massive post-season mini-game. EA and Sega, take notes!
One nice bit about ASB 2005 is that the “create-a-player” mode is fairly deep, which means if the game overlooked a rookie when they finalized rosters, like Twins catcher Joe Mauer, at least you can create a pretty-close approximation. Sure, the other games have create-a-player, too; but ASB’s is probably the more-detailed and more-flexible of the lot.
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Still, it’s massively depressing that not one single baseball sim this season “got it right” and included Mauer in the out-of-the-box game. Sure, he’s there if you sign online and download a roster update; but it’s still laziness on the part of Acclaim, EA and Sega that Mauer didn’t appear in ANY of their games this season, out of the box.
Of course, I use Mauer as a local example because I’m a Twins fan; there are other key roster oversights on other teams, but I don’t know those examples as well, so I used Mauer as my “major league rookie accuracy” meter this season. All three franchises failed.
Speaking of online play, ASB has it again this year; however, the cheat-prevent structures on Acclaim’s server are less advanced than those on EA’s or even Sega’s. I have no information on whether Xbox Live adds additional cheat-protections as I write this because the version I reviewed was on PS2. Oddly, Acclaim chose to drop GameCube support this year and has also not announced GBA or PC versions of their game; only PS2 and Xbox get ASB this time out.
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In all, All-Star Baseball 2005 has a lot of life left in it, but the improvements introduced by EA’s MVP franchise reveal some fat along the edges of ASB. With some hard work, Acclaim can catch up and surpass MVP once again, as long as they do not get intimidated by the monster that is EA Sports; of course, that’s what EA Sports is so good at when they’re good, such as with the Madden NFL franchise – they find a good design and work hard to innovate and stay a few paces ahead of the pack, rather than playing catch-up.
But in baseball, EA’s been playing catch-up for years due to the arcade-y and unpopular Triple Play franchise; whether they return to playing catch-up or establish another indomitable franchise with MVP will in large part depend on how Acclaim’s ASB responds to the challenge.
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All the building blocks are here in ASB to catch up and surpass EA once again; but if they rest on their laurels, ASB could also just start looking more and more dated. Time will tell the tale.
For this year, though, ASB finishes a close second-place to EA’s MVP Baseball and well ahead of the yawn-inducing ESPN Baseball.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ Much more effective bunting system than MVP or ESPN. + Includes all three levels of minor leagues, AAA, AA and A. + Draft occurs at right time of year, one of countless details ASB gets right that other games don’t. + Spring training’s player development system makes playing the pre-season schedule important. + Arguably the best-looking graphics of any console baseball sim this year. |
8.8 |
| What Doesn't | |
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— Doesn’t pass the “is rookie Joe Mauer on the Twins or even in the game” roster accuracy test. — The minors are still just “rosters” with no real in-season interactivity, let alone minor league games. — FielderCam and BroadcastCam are camera tricks that just make it harder to make plays. — Play-by-play from Thom Brennaman and Steve Lyons is solid, but in implementation, choppy at times with long pauses and tends to get muddled if the player skips highlights and other optional filler. |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| While not quite as slick in presentation as EA’s MVP Baseball 2004, Acclaim’s All-Star Baseball 2005 is still a class-act baseball sim. While it’s showing signs of age and needs to catch up with MVP in some regards, it’s easily the second-best baseball sim on PS2 this season. And some may still prefer it. | |
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Tags: All Star Baseball 2005
Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Jun 15th, 2004 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
