All-Star Baseball 2003

 I think this might be the first time I've ever gone back to a series that wasn't a "big deal" video game IP.

Sure I've had multiple posts about Mega Man and Final Fantasy games, but those series' are household names. They certainly aren't as obscure as a discontinued series of baseball games that ran through the late 90s and early aughts. I already covered All-Star Baseball 99 for the Nintendo 64, a game I gave a pretty good score. At the time, it was probably the best baseball sim you could find. It's certainly not anymore, but its still a good, fun game to break out from time to time.

But if that game was so great, what happened to the franchise? Well, for one, the company that made it went out of business. Acclaim filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and it's intellectual properties were auctioned off, most of which were purchased by a company called Throwback Entertainment. Throwback then proceeded to do a big, fat nothing with the ASB series until 2018, when it sold the IP to Liquid Media Group along with the other former Acclaim Sports franchises (NFL Quarterback Club and NBA Jam, for the record). Even if Throwback had wanted to, releasing an All-Star Baseball game would have been impossible because Take 2, the parent company of 2K games, had an exclusivity agreement with Major League Baseball up until 2012, which prevented third party developers from releasing licensed baseball games.

In short, the failure of the ASB series wasn't entirely the result of the games not being good. However, the series had certainly stagnated by this point and was beginning to take a back seat to it's competitors, EA's new MVP Baseball and Sony's MLB Baseball (which would evolve into MLB: The Show). Simply put, those games innovated while ASB didn't. The target reticle batting interface was fine, or even preferable, for the pacing and limitations of the 5th gen games. But it was not ideal for these new consoles. In many ways, it was actually the better technology and more realistic graphics that made these games worse. ASB may look better than its predecessors, but it certainly doesn't play better.

But before I get into the negatives, I want to discuss the single biggest positive ASB 2003 has going for it: Expansion Mode. I hadn't seen a mode like this in a baseball game before and I haven't seen one since, but I think its so cool. Basically, you get to select a city for a new MLB team and build from the ground up. There's an expansion draft, where you can pick from unprotected players on the existing teams, and you get new rookies randomly added to your roster after each season. It's not all that deep by modern standards, you can only pick from a few cities, uniform and stadium customization options are limited and there's no real offseason to speak of, but at the time this was incredible. I would love to see something like this in a more modern baseball game as a variation of franchise mode.

The other big positive here is the graphics. This was a huge step up from the previous version and at the time was one of the better looking baseball games on the market. The stadiums looked great and the player models were nice and smooth. The animations were well done, though they were a little slow, almost like everything is in slow motion. The presentation has also taken a major step forward, with new camera angles and pre-game overlays. The batters all have unique mannerism when they step into the box and pitchers stomp around the mound after each throw. The developers went a long way towards making this look like an actual broadcast of a baseball game.

Unfortunately, both of those positives are also the source of the games biggest flaws. The pacing here is a complete nightmare. All of those overlays and realistic antics between pitches are great, but you can't skip them. In the Show, you can choose to skip these if you want to, which speeds up the pace of play. Having to watch the catcher throw the ball back, the pitcher walk around, the batter adjust his gloves and the infielders re-set after every single pitch gets old fast. 

The pitches themselves move extremely fast, way faster than you can move the batting reticle. This makes it so you essentially have to guess the pitch properly if you want to make contact. In the old ASB games, the pitches moved slow enough that you could move the reticle, but not so slow that it was easy to do so. Basically, that made it so guessing right resulted in good contact, but you would still have the opportunity to at least make some contact if you could react quickly. That's not the case in ASB 03, guess wrong and you will miss. It's not so bad once you get the timing down, but it took me quite a while for me to do so.

The pitching is just okay, you just choose a pitch and where to throw it. That was okay back in the day, but by this time MVP Baseball had introduced a pitching meter, allowing you to add more to or take something off of a pitch. It also made the game more realistic, as messing up the meter would result in your pitch not going where it was supposed to. I've met people that have pitched at every level from little league all the way up to the majors, and a grand total of none of them had every pitch they threw go exactly where it was supposed to. It was attempts at more realism like that led MVP, MLB2K and The Show in pulling away from ASB.

At the end of the day, there isn't much reason to go back and play ASB '03 today outside of its expansion mode. It's older iterations may not look as nice, but they are more user friendly and fun. It's contemporaries are far better games with more features and better pacing, especially MVP Baseball (side rant, EA needs to bring back MVP Baseball and they need to bring it back ASAP). More recent versions of MLB: The Show are better representations of actual baseball and again, offer so much more to do. That leaves ASB '03 in limbo. I can't say it's a bad game, because it certainly is not. It's just there are better options across the board.

6.75/10