World Series Baseball 2K2

Sega Sports July 2002--This year's field of baseball titles struck out worse than a blind pitcher, so here's hoping that Sega can jumpstart things. The rebuilt Franchise mode is a great start, but purists can get fired up over the game's tip of the hat to history: You can play with 25 of the all-time great players in addition to dressing up in the old-school team unis. Finally, a chance to don those Astros' oh-so-mirthful jerseys.

World Series Baseball is just a joy to play. Sega did a great job balancing both fun and realism. The pitching interface is easy to use, although it can be very difficult to judge where your pitch is going when the pitching cursor is turned off, which was a tad frustrating. Also, the batting system uses a cursor that you line up with the pitch which really adds to the challenge of hitting. They also did a great job of making the ball react appropriately in relation to how it was hit. For example, hit on top of the ball and it's driven straight into the ground. Hit under it and you'll pop it up. Most of the games I played were close, competitive, and a fairly accurate representation of the real sport. Great stuff overall.

Since the game was developed exclusively for XBOX, the graphical detail is downright scary. I have never seen player faces that looked so much like the real-life player, and the bodies are proportioned perfectly. Not only do the players look great, but the animations are absolutely amazing.

Dive for a ball and watch the second baseman throw to first from his knees. Screen shots will never do justice for the graphical detail packed into this game; there are so many examples of the detail that has been put into this game that I could go on for pages. On the downside, the lame 2D cutouts in the crowd were a bit of a bummer since everything else looked so beautiful, which just magnified how bad they looked. Come on, this is the XBOX, it can handle a 3D crowd.

This game also has the deepest franchise mode I have ever seen. You can hire batting coaches, pitching coaches and scouts to develop your minor league players. You can get reports from your minor league scouts on the development of your prospects and they'll even make recommendations on who's ready for the big leagues.

You could literally spend hours playing general manager before you even step on to the field. Don't worry though, it's all very intuitive and you're not required to make any changes, but for those of you that love to tinker, you should be quite satisfied.