Does Avatar Baseball hit a home run. Read on to find out.
Over here in jolly old England we don’t play Baseball, so apologies if there are any terms that are incorrect. Apart from the baseball ‘game’ on Wii Sports I believe this is my first time playing it on a console so I was eagerly awaiting to see what all the fuss is about.
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Avatar Baseball allows you to play against the CPU or another player in a versus mode. The two teams to take turns batting or fielding. The batting team has three lives and when they are lost the teams switch over. The game uses a method of throwing the ball which works very well. Two blue bars scroll from the sides of the screen to the center and you must stop them in turn as close to the center as possible. The batter must then stop their marker in between those bars to hit the ball. There is an element of strategy here, because you can stop one or both of the bars further away from the center to force the ball to be hit towards the left or right of the field. Occasionally a black ball will appear between the bars which if the batting marker is stopped on will result in a perfect hit and a home run.
The pitching and batting system works very well but the fielding and running between the bases is not as well implemented. You have a number of players on the field which are activated manually by pressing the trigger buttons, this means if the highlighted player is on the left side of the field but the ball is heading towards the right, you must press the triggers to the correct player before you can even think about moving the one you want. The delays costs time and the situation is made worse because the last chosen player is automatically highlighted on the next turn. A devious opponent can use this to their advantage and try to hit the ball in the opposite direction to gain an unfair advantage. An auto switching to nearest player to the ball would have been great.
Running between bases is an experience to say the least. On paper it sounds fine; move your avatar to the bases by pressing B, Y, X, A in turn. This is fine for one player on the field but to move multiple players between bases it turns into a game of thumb twister as you have to hold your fingers on each button to move them. I am also fairly sure in a real game of baseball you can move backwards to a base, but in Avatar Baseball you are unable to. I would have liked to have seen this better implemented as it can get very confusing especially with not being able to backtrack.
Graphically the game is fairly basic. The in game graphics have a retro feel, reminding me of a NES game for example, mixed with the more modern looking Xbox Avatars. One thing that was a little annoying at times was the graphics for the remaining lives in the top of the screen sometimes got in the way of the ball and/or the player if they landed behind them. Easily fixable by having them at the bottom out of the way. Music is an old blues song, I am not sure if it relates to baseball but to me it sounded somewhat out of place. Sound effects are more suited to the game with speech for strikes and outs along with crowd cheers and background noise.
For me, Avatar Baseball does not quite hit a home run, more of a 3rd base (yeah, stop sniggering!). With some changes to the fielding and running between bases I feel this could be a great little game but as it stands the partly poor controls spoil the game for me. I would certainly recommend you at least try the trial version.
You can find more information on Avatar Baseball on the Xbox Marketplace.
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