Those familiar with Sega's World Series Baseball 2k2 for the dearly departed Dreamcast will find many similarities and quite a few improvments in this installment of the popular baseball franchise. Complete with enhamced A.I., graphics, and animations, WSB stands above the other baseball offerings available for the Xbox. In an attempt to salvage their reputation from the horrendous WSB2k1, Sega handed the reins for WSB2k2 and WSB - Xbox over to the team behind their other acclaimed sports franchises. Visual Concepts. Thankfully, they did a good job on WSB2k2 - DC and an even better job for WSB - Xbox.
The heart and soul of any sports game is it's ability to faithfully recreate the sport it portrays, and make an experience as close to eality as possible. While not many baseball games do this, WSB is pretty close. The fielding, while still not without it's flaws, is much improved, and the play mechanics have been refined to make it easier to throw and catch effectively. Batting has also been refined and is configurable with or without batting and pitching cursors. Playing without batting cursors is darn near impossible, but playing without pitching cursors makes the game much more strategic and more like a real game of baseball. Buttons are relatively responsive, and the players react to your requests immediately for the most part. Sometimes there will be a slight lag before the player will throw the ball, and at times will lob theball instead of rocketing it in to make the play. But other than those minor flaws, the gameplay is enjoyable and slick.
The first thing I noticed about the Xbox version is how strikingly similar the Xbox version is to the DC version. I must admit I was somewhat disappointed with the graphics at first, as I was expecting more out of the big green box's capabilities. The players look good, but not as lifelike as they could, the fields, while detailed, are blurry up close and the audience is still the standard 2 dimension flat cutout people that appeared in the DC versions. One glaring oversight is the billboards and signs around the field, particularly behind homeplate. Seeing the Diamondbacks logo behind the plate all blurred to the extent you'd expect to see on a PS1 game still bugs my eye everytime I play. However, the player animations are exceptional, as are the player stances, approaches and swinging styles. Players scoop, jump, dive and catch elegantly and gracefully, it just would have been nice to see such polish on the rest of the game. Framerates seem to stutter at the least expected times, such as when a ball is popped up into foul territory, but don't effect gameplay for the most part. Would have been nice to see more done with the Xbox's graphical capabilities.
Commentary is done well, but it is surprisingly repetitive. After playing only two games with the same team, the very same comments pop up over and over and eventually become tiresome. This time around though, they are fitting with the plays and happenings in the game instead of before, where the commentators sometimes seemed to be talking about some other game going on elsewhere. The cround reactions are precise and times just right with runs and good hits. The spectators in each stadium even heckle and cheer for their favorite players, which is a very nice touch. I may be the only one, but I would like to see some more Xbox sports games take avantage of the soundtrack feature of the Xbox so I could play my tunes thru the game on games like this one.
Being a sports title with loads of modes available, you won't soon tire of the challenge it presents you. Even playing thru one season is a total of 162 games at least, so even playing one each day would take over 4 months to complete. That being said, replayability is a given.
I thouroughly enjoyed WSb for the Xbox and feel it is the most acurate representation of America's favorite pasttime to date. Not without noticable flaws, but it plays very well despite all that. I would recommend this particular baseball title over the other offerings on the Xbox, and quite frankly any other console baseball game I have played so far.
