High Heat Baseball 2000

This game annoys me on so many levels I don't know where to begin. For starters--for the love of God. please--no more digital control for sports games'. Analog is a must!! There's a reason they pack those things in with every new PlayStation now, damn it!! On a serious note, among the heavier flaws this one has is the woefully imprecise batting and pitching controls. While the makers claim an infinite amount of tosses are possible, in reality it's tough to consistently get the ball in the strike zone. Many of the pitches gingerly float through the air sportin' an arch Ronald McDonald would be proud of. They just don't look real. Trying to hit is even worse. It plays more like softball than baseball. Connecting with the slow-moving sphere is tough and unnatural--no fluidity whatsoever. On top of that, a huge skip in animation leaves out the batter's follow-through. That explains why the game has no replay. I think. In general, High Heat suffers badly when compared to almost all the other baseball games on the market. It comes across as first-generation-ish in every category except graphics, which are fairly decent. Two-player contests do nothing to redeem this poor sim either. It merely lets you share the frustration with a friend or enemy. Wow. It's obvious--stay away from this ambitious but ultimately sub-par sim.

I know it's a bit silly of me to bring this up, but I can't help it-what the heck was Trip Hawkins thinking when he "guaranteed satisfaction" in 3DO's High Heat Baseball ad? Did he ever bother to play the game? It's terrible! I hate to bludgeon the work of hard-working game developers, but this game just doesn't cut It The graphics stink, the gameplay is archaic, the sounds are can't think of a single reason to even rent this.

In a word, HHB is sloppy. Awkward isn't a bad word either. Whatever the case, I'm not impressed. In fact, the only thing that does impress me are the voiceovers. I just don't know what's up with the graphics in this one--why are they so primitive? Players stand and move strangely, backgrounds look like they're from the Genesis and animations get cut off before they're finished. If the game felt better, the graphics wouldn't matter near as much.

Why enter the crowded PS baseball game market if you're not going to make a Triple Play-killer? And Triple Play-killer this game ain't. High Heat has some rather sluggish controls. Even worse, it has an archaic batting interface. Without some type of targeting cursor, all you do is swing and hope you connect with the right pitches (by the way, it's a bit hard to distinguish what's in the strike zone or not, and bat swings are slow). The Al isn't the best either...