All-Star Baseball 99

Spring is finally here!  Of course, that means baseball is back, so I figured its time to take a look back at the All-Star Baseball Series.

As I discussed in my Gameday review, football games always sort of had “top franchise” that was regarded as being better than its competitors.  First it was the Tecmo Bowl series, then Gameday and now Madden is the only game in town.  The history of baseball games is a little more convoluted.  There were tons of these things, but they always seemed to be an afterthought.  Even sports giant EA’s baseball series, Triple Play, was considered a laughing stock by many.  

I should also note that I do have a little bit of genre bias here.  While there are fun football games across generations of gaming (seriously, check out Super Challenge Football for the Atari 2600) I find any baseball game that came out before the 32/64-bit era to be unplayable.  Yes, that includes the much-loved Ken Griffey Jr. games on SNES.  I think both of them are terrible.

But in 1999, All-Star Baseball 99 hit the N64.  Real teams, real players, real stadiums and the closest thing I had ever seen to real baseball in a video game.  It’s laughable to say that when compared to something like “MLB: The Show ‘19,” but 20 years ago it didn’t get any better than this.  You could play exhibition games or full seasons, make trades or sign free agents.  For the purpose of this review, I played through a rematch of the 1998 World Series.  Gameday took me back to a dark age in Giants history, but ASB ‘99 had me pining for a time when the Yankees were untouchable, the team in Boston hadn’t won a World Series in 80 years and people routinely hit millions of homers.

To me, the most important part of a baseball game is the batting interface.  At the time, ASB 99’s reticle based batting system was a revelation.  You move the cursor to where you want think the ball is going to go and swing with the A button.  Press B and your cursor shrinks, but you gain more power.  It’s all very easy to pick up and play and even non-gamers will pick it up after a game or two (trust me, my father played almost as much of this game as I did back in the day).  It hasn’t aged particularly well, but its still fun.

Pitching is pretty simple too.  Pick a pitch with one of the C buttons, move it with the cursor, press A and throw.  There is a good variety of pitches and each one behaves as its supposed to.  Fielding is also easy to pick up, the joystick moves your player and each of the C buttons represent a bas to throw to.  You get a nice, easy to follow indicator to track fly balls and you can dive or jump with the A and B buttons respectively.  Again, its easy to pick up and play, but its simple.

Presentation-wise this game was great for its time. Again, it isn’t close to “the Show,” but in 1999 it was as close as you were going to get.  The blocky players with their weird, stretched out faces look ridiculous now, but they tried their best with what they had. This is the first game I remember where all the players didn’t look the same.  Derek Jeter is skinny.  David Ortiz is fat.  Mark McGwire is jacked.  All the players batting stances and pitching rotations are thoughtfully recreated, from Chuck Knoblauch holding the bat flat to Barry Bonds flailing it around.  Hideo Nomo’s windup is fully recreated and takes a full five seconds.  John Sterling and Michael Kay provide unintentionally hilarious commentary.  It looks and sounds silly by today’s standards, but it was revolutionary at the time.

I have always found sports games to age more poorly than other genres and I think that is definitely the case here.  Sports simulations need to feel like simulations and ASB doesn’t cut it anymore in that regard.  While you have your batting reticle, you can’t really control whether you try to pull the ball or go the other way.  Pitching is limited and you can’t take anything off of or add anything to your pitches.  Lots of baseball logic gets turned on its head.  Think you should throw a splitter low in the zone?  Forget it.  The CPU will take every single time.  Throw it high, so it breaks down into the strike zone.  Try throwing a pitch like that to virtual Bryce Harper or Mike Trout in “The Show” and see what happens.  Long story short, it used to be as close to realistic as you could bet, but it isn’t close by modern standards.

However, it’s still worth playing today in the same way Gameday is.  It’s a great arcade style experience to play with a buddy that may not be a hardcore gamer or baseball fan.  I love the new Show titles, but they aren’t exactly accessible to non-baseball fans.  I like the simulation aspect, but not everyone does.  I love that you can play a whole 30 year franchise, but some people just want to press start and play ball.  That is why games like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz are popular and I think you can still get a lot of mileage out of games like All-Stat Baseball 99.

In the end, the series would die out after the 2005 edition.  It didn’t do enough to change the gameplay, opting for the same thing with prettier graphics.  I have to give them credit for the expansion team mode that some of the later games had, but they were entirely too easy.  By that time, EA Sports had their act together, as they opted to put “Triple Play” out to pasture in favor of the outstanding, though short lived, MVP Baseball series.  Sony’s MLB series was in the early stages of evolving into “The Show.”  Most of the other series’ had died out (and good riddance to most of them) and All-Star Baseball would soon die with them.  Still, the ‘99 edition is a fun, old school baseball game.

8.5/10

You should play this game if:

You want a pick up and play sports game

As far as you're concerned, the steroid era was the best era

You aren't a stickler for baseball related details

Avoid if:

You need your baseball games to be super realistic

You hate the reticle target based batting