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I’m talking World Series Baseball 2K3. As one of the many who were burned by World Series Baseball on the Dreamcast, I thought I was turned off from this series for life. Oh well, like an abusive spouse, I can never stay mad at Sega (or more-so Visual Concepts) for long. This year’s effort, despite a few gameplay flaws, is the most realistic representation of hardball I’ve ever come across. Where to start? The games front end makes everything easy to access and never more than a few button presses away. Sega picked up the ESPN license this year and I’ve got to say it was money well spent. It has that look and feel of watching Sportscenter and watching a live ESPN broadcast. Everything from the menus to the stat pages has the familiar ESPN vibe. The entire presentation really sets the mood for playing a game of baseball. Of course, all this would be nothing if the game didn’t play as good as its looks.

The good news is, overall it does play pretty darn good. The many ways in which you can manipulate the gameplay is staggering. There’s a multitude of ways just to set up the pitcher/batter interface and ways to swing the bat. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. A great example is the extensive custom set of gameplay sliders where you can adjust everything from opponents batting avg. to how aggressive the computer steals bases. It can be overwhelming at first, but you should warm up to it after a bit. Everyone should be able to find a happy medium between realistic baseball stats and challenging AI. Once you’ve got all your gameplay sliders set up, or you can just pick the default Rookie, Pro, Legend settings if you like, you’re ready to take hold of the lumber and start swinging for the fences. You have a few choices on how to swing the bat that vary from just tapping a button at the right time to having to time holding down the button for power and aiming the cursor to where the pitch is going at the same time. I preferred the slightly more challenging Power Pro hitting, but all the modes work well.

Pitching is pretty standard and a big upgrade from the Dreamcast version where you couldn’t even tell what pitches your pitcher had unless you memorized the pitch tree. Every pitcher has their real-life assortment of pitches. The customization of the pitching interface is amazing. You can set pitches to be dead on where you throw them to different levels of variable pitching where the ball will vary in placement according to “control” stats of your player. Pitchers like Randy Johnson will be overpowering in the game but pitching with a Ryan Franklin can get you into trouble. It seems pretty well balanced and overall the pitcher/hitter interface is spot-on.

How Visual Concepts decided to handle fielding in the game was a great decision. Your players will lock on to fly balls and you can even set-up your player to throw to the cut-off man, if you so choose. Even choosing to redirect a throw after the balls already in the air. It’s the little things like this that make this game so great.

So far so good; I haven’t even mentioned the extremely deep franchise and season modes, or the excellent create-a-player mode where you have full control over hundreds of variables for your player. Let’s just say both are really deep and won’t disappoint any baseball fans that are willing to take on a full season like I did. I’m about halfway through my season and my team has some pretty realistic stats right now. You have control over minor league players and full control over coaches. Sometimes the coaches will even get you tips on foreign prospects or great trade opportunities. You control the Disabled List, you control who goes up and down from the minor leagues, and you even control the budgeting and everything from resigning players to firing and hiring coaches. If that sounds like a lot, that’s because there is a lot. You can have the AI handle most these choices for you so you can concentrate on playing baseball, but I’m sure glad they included such a deep interface.

So now onto the things that bug me, since everything up until now has been good. The commentating got annoying - sorry Rex, I’m not a fan. The graphics on the PS2 paled in comparison to the sharp X-box graphics, but I knew this going in and they are still more than acceptable. The stadiums are beautiful and the players look great. The computer never seems to hit homeruns off of me, which is sort of annoying no matter how much I’ve played with the sliders. Speaking with others though, I’ve found this is not that common of a problem. I guess maybe I’m too good of a pitcher for my own good. Stealing bases can be WAY too easy and I find myself forcing myself not to steal because it’s too easy. Some of the animations also come off pretty clumsy. Lastly why you can’t access the custom sliders while in franchise mode is beyond me, since you can switch them on but you can edit them without exited back to the main menu and changing them then reloading your franchise. It’s a little annoying, but none of these stopped me from getting a great amount of enjoyment out of the game.

It really is a great year for baseball games. You can’t really go wrong with almost any of the choices on the market. I’ve got to put this game just ahead of All-Star Baseball and MVP Baseball as the must buy this year. It does a lot of the little things right and it can be as deep as you want it to be. It’s so adjustable that you and I could be playing the game in completely different fashions and it’s this adjustability that makes the game customizable to your own playing style. You want to jack home runs and pitch a no-hitter? You can set it up to play just like that. Do you want a real challenge and 1-0 ball games? Doable. Everything came together this year for Visual Concepts and I look forward to where they can take us next year. Great game, highly recommended.