BIGS Time
Hate baseball games? Excellent, then The BIGS was made for you.
Published: July 15, 2007
Of course any player can be juiced up enough to pull a ball into the cheap seats if at the expense of the turbo and an ever-growing points meter that when filled will allow you to burn it up for a single at-bat where connecting is a guaranteed home run, and if you're on the mound, you can chew through the full meter to make every pitch a turbo pitch. If you can strike the player out, you'll steal a little of the opposing team's meter, so it's not an entirely offensive move. For smaller one-time uses, though, the turbo is perfect. You can turn a normal hit into a fireball that may stop infielders from being able to collect the ball, and it's especially useful during baserunning or the frankly cumbersome fielding to get to a fly ball in time.
If the big play meter is added to by striking or throwing someone out (or, if you're lucky, you can jump toward a ball to make a big play or catch someone in a double play to really pocket some points), the turbo meter is built up by smaller moves, and most of them are at the plate or on the mound. Throwing strikes pushes the pitcher's turbo up -- and multiple successive strikes increase it more -- but if you're at the plate and you spot an incoming ball (the game graciously lets you know, but a clear ball is fairly rare), letting it pass will move up the batter's meter.
Turbo, then is meant to be used fairly regularly to augment a normal player's strengths or boost some of the weaker player's attributes to make them more apt, but even with the Roadrunner speed of someone like Ichiro, the fielding can be extremely annoying. Oh, there are few things as fun as rushing the back wall, hitting X and then leaping 30 feet into the air and hitting a sequence of buttons to rob the other team of a home run, but in just catching deep field hits, the game's weird sense of momentum and difficulty in switching players can lead to a ton of missed outs, even though the AI has no problem when it's fielding.
Fielding aside, though, this is a game that boils down big plays into something that is as simple as the old 8-bit baseball games. With only two buttons to choose from when batting (contact and power swings) simple aim-with-the-left-analog-stick targeting for hits and pitches that require only holding down the button that corresponds to the type of pitch you want after positioning the end result with the left analog stick, the controls couldn't be more simple to grasp. Little touches like a pitcher's confidence going down after a batter rips a successful hit (or, worse, a full-on home run) keep you from milking the same pitch over and over again (it's even possible to completely lose a pitch, and if it's the fastball, it can be incredibly detrimental).
The simple 1-5 star system for grading abilities does away with the useless 0-99 metric from most sports games, and even if you don't know the players, you can actually build a pretty solid team by just taking someone with good speed and pairing them up with a power hitter in the lineup. No, it's not deep exactly, no part of the game is, but for a straight arcade baseball game, I couldn't have asked for a lower barrier of entry.
Without a doubt, though, the best arcade draw appears only in the PS3 version (guess the PSP one didn't have enough oomph to pull it off): Home Run Pinball. Yeah, there's a Home Run Derby mode in both games, but it pales in comparison to the idea of smashing up a row of taxies to unlock multipliers and bonus balls, and once you hit a power shot right into the Times Square New Year's Ball, the game just clicks. It's even better when you have a group of friends around and you can just pass the controller with each game, though if you're all by your lonesome, there's at least an online ranking system.