Game Company’s Description: All-Star Baseball 2005 gives you the most realistic “between the lines” game play experience ever with ASB05’s exclusive FielderCam. The perennial best selling Baseball videogame franchise is more fun and accessible than ever before, packed with exclusive feature innovations, online head-to-head play AND the deepest franchise mode of any baseball video game.
FEATURES:
• Exclusive new FielderCam™ & BroadcastCam for the most realistic “between the lines” experience available.
• Analog-Control Batting lets you hit for average and power with the greatest of ease.
• Online Head-To-Head play plus downloadable rosters.
• Exclusive TWIB® (This Week In Baseball®) Challenge lets you relive or change historic moments from the 2003 MLB™ season and unlock TWIB media extras.
• Deepest Franchise Mode available includes Spring Training, Expansion Mode, Create-A-Team and random season schedules.
• Two-man commentary from Steve Lyons and Thom Brennaman, Spanish Play-By-Play from Arizona Diamondbacks™ announcer Oscar Soria and Closed Captioning.
• Master All-Star Baseball 2005 with a video game play tutorial from Steve Lyons.
• Create-A-Player returns with all new textures allowing gamers to make their own MLB all-star.
• Over 80 fully animated stadiums including current MLB parks, legendary stadiums, Spring Training™ stadiums and fantasy parks.
Look: Although the FielderCam is a great innovation it highlights some graphical issues. The players are robotic and don’t move quite as fluid as you’d like. The field, stadium, and highlights are extremely well done. You can almost smell the grass.
Feel: Let’s start with what we came here for, the Franchise. You could be playing until October thanks to the depth of ASB. You start in spring training and work to create and better your team better by earning points. You have a budget in order to manage your team right down to the medical staff. There is another cool option to create your own team right down to the mascot.
There are extras like home run derby, batting practice, trivia, and This Week in Baseball mode. In one of those weeks you can redo the Cubs/Bartman incident. Very cool.
FielderCam allows you to see the pitch and its movement from behind the pitcher. Wow. Finally you can see your button pushing at work, but don’t watch to long or you might be watching it leave the park. Batting can be difficult yet some of the pitches don’t appear to be zipping along, unless I’m in the zone and everything is slowing down for me. Doubtful.
The camera has a lot of issues. It jumps to different perspectives and angles after the ball is hit into the field and you can get confused causing a slower jump on the ball. A few times the camera sets up behind the wrong fielder making it near impossible to make a play on the ball.
Hear: The most obvious item that sticks out is the crowd; who won’t hesitate to turn on you in a moment. One minute they are cheering your home run and then you make a mistake and they will jump all over you.
Frankly: The franchise is deep. There are camera issues that can make the game frustrating but overall you’ll find enough pleasure to make the investment worth it.
+ Ralphie Wright
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