It's time to continue our now-annual tradition of starting the year with an old sports game review. A few weeks ago, I talked about Cricket. Now it's time to talk about how we put bats on balls on this side of the pond.
I can't, for the life of me, determine when this edition of Triple Play Baseball came from. A quick web search will show that it came out in 2001 and is the only game in EA's baseball sim series that doesn't have a year attached to it. You would think that you would just find the year that's missing, but the same search will also turn up information on Triple Play 2000, 2001 and 2002 and they all appear to be unique games. Maybe this is Triple Play 2001.5? I guess we shouldn't get that wrapped up in such things. I mean, does it really matter? Of course not. The quality of the game is what's important. And Triple Play Baseball has to be at least decent, right? I mean, EA was on fire at this point and with their quality control and attention to detail, we were bound to get a good baseball sim, right? Yeah, not so much.
This review might feel a little bit familiar coming off my Cricket article, because I am going to complain extensively about the fielding controls. If you recall, I said fielding was the worst part of Cricket 2022 and that it made a potentially great game merely good. Well, once again we have a bat-and-ball sports game where fielding is the biggest issue. But Triple Play Baseball is even worse than Cricket 2022, to the point it's almost impossible to successfully field a ground ball. Between the awkward camera angle and the barely visible player indicator, you have no idea who you are controlling once the ball ends up in play. I ran away from balls I was trying to catch more often than I actually ran towards them, which is kind of a problem. Fly balls were a little easier, but only because you had time to actually stop and look at which player you were controlling and get to where you needed to go. Compounding all of this, your fielders move incredibly slowly. It's almost like they were all channeling cover athlete and walking HGH depository Jason Giambi every time the ball was put in play. Also, the throwing controls are bizarre and unintuitive, you have to hold down a button and press the analog stick towards the right base, I think. I never really could figure it out.
If that were the only issue, I guess I could have gotten around it. But I was legitimately shocked how bad the graphics were. Don't get me wrong, they weren't absolutely terrible, not by any stretch. But Triple Play was easily the worst looking baseball game of the era and it came from then-untouchable EA. It's like they put literally every resource they had into Madden and just ignored this game. The player faces actually look pretty good, I will give them that. But that almost made their goofy bodies look even worse than they already did. Sure, Roger Clemens' face looks like him, but he has the body of a 12-year-old boy. This was the peak of his bat-throwing roid rage era, where he looked like a shaved gorilla in pinstripes. How hard would that have been to recreate? You grab Donkey Kong's sprite, you change a few colors and Bam! There he is! At least the sound is okay, the crack of the bat and roar of the crowd are nice and there is some really interesting licensed music. Again, that wasn't common in games at the time, so it was nice to see.
It's a bit of a shame, because the pitching and batting interface was perfectly acceptable. You have reticle-based hitting, which was the standard style at the time. The game was definitely more geared towards hitting, as your swing radius is huge, and a lot of the breaking balls don't seem like they really break all that much. Pitches do feel like they come in at a weird angle visually, but once you get used to it it isn't really a big deal. Each pitcher has four different pitches to select from, which you choose with a button and locate with the analog stick. Hold the respective button longer to put more on the pitch. Batting was pretty standard, with power and contact swings. Outside of single game, season and playoffs, the only mode on offer was, essentially, home run derby and this was the mode I had the most fun with. I normally don't like doing these, but the game was so heavily skewed towards batting and fielding was so miserable that it just felt the best of any game mode.
Triple Play definitely skews towards offense. It was way, way easier to hit home runs here than it was in any other baseball game of the era. In a lot of ways, it feels way more arcade-y than All-Star Baseball or MLB offerings of its era. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing. Sure, arcade sports titles can be really fun, but that isn't what most gamers were expecting when they bought the flagship baseball game from EA sports. Madden, FIFA, NBA and NHL games of the era all seemed to do a really good job of balancing making the games feel like simulations versus giving concessions to make gameplay more accessible. Triple Play was just all offense all the time, I would have thought I was playing MLB slugfest if not for the lack of body slams and drop kicks. It feels like all you can do is hit a home run, walk, or strike out...maybe the game was actually visionary? Like it predicted exactly what Major League Baseball would be like 20 years down the road? Whoa.
Either way, most sports fans were largely done with the Triple Play series at this point. Madden was starting to distance itself from other football games for all the right reasons. Triple Play was separating itself from its peers as well, but for all the wrong ones. Sony's MLB series, it would become The Show a few years later, and MLB2K were both widely considered superior at this point. So, EA went back to the drawing board. Triple Play would soon be no more, replaced with MVP Baseball. I am probably going to review one, or more, of those games at some point so I won't say too much here other than they are all excellent. For three years, EA was back on top of the heap of baseball games and truthfully, it felt like they were about to officially establish a monopoly on the sports genre as a whole. 2K would eventually douse that fire, as they obtained 3rd party exclusivity rights to the MLB and MLB Player's Association licenses in 2006. Many of us at the time believed it was a spite-driven response to EA's exclusivity deal with the NFL. But either way, it meant MVP baseball was dead, and it led to EA ceasing production of baseball games almost entirely. It's a shame, I really would love to see a modern MVP baseball game. The aforementioned exclusivity agreement has since expired, so it could happen. But at this point, MLB: The Show is so firmly entrenched as the go-to Baseball game that I'm not sure if it would be viable.
It's crazy how quickly things change in the gaming world. In a span of five years, EA went from Triple Play to MVP to no baseball game at all. And while it's a shame MVP is gone, it was very apparent why the Triple Play series ended the way it did. It may have had some technically impressive moments and it was fun to mash long balls, but there wasn't enough substance. The game was borderline unplayable once the ball left the bat and it just couldn't stack up to its contemporaries. A swing and a miss.
4/10
Comments
Post a Comment