Games - All-Star Baseball

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	Games - All-Star Baseball

All-Star Baseball is a baseball video game series developed and published by Acclaim Entertainment. The series began in 1998 with the release of All-Star Baseball '99. Although the announcers John Sterling and Michael Kay have been added during the ballgame from 1998-2000 for N64. The current and perhaps final release in the series due to the bankruptcy of Acclaim, is All-Star Baseball 2005.

Within the individual games, there are several different modes of play, such as exhibition, managing an existing Major League Baseball team, creating a team or creating a player. Many North American cities are available for "expansion," in addition to Mexico City and Puerto Rico.

The series usually features pro-athlete Derek Jeter on the cover.

Series

Gameplay

Players can play an exhibition game against the computer, or a 162 game season, choosing their favorite team. A player can also create its own players, and give them as much playing talent as the user might desire. There are five levels of play: rookie, veteran, all-star, legend and hall-of-famer. The rookie level is recommended for beginners: when using the rookie level, hitting the ball becomes automatically easier (with a mechanism that the game calls "timing"), In addition, players can choose whether the fielding during a game will be done entirely by the player, by the computer, or as a combination, both by the player and the computer. The latter is called the "assist" fielding mode.

There are other modes of play. These are called the "Bonus play modes". The bonus play modes consist of a pick-up baseball game, a Baseball Weekly trivia game, a trivia game, batting practice, and a home run contest. The pick-up game in particular features four different fields where the player can stage games, these being a school yard, a sandlot, a city park and a corn field. Major League Players "show up" for the pick-up games, but the player himself or herself has no control of who will show up, the computer makes that decision. Typically, 16 contemporary players and two retired players (ex. Ty Cobb and Satchel Paige) show up for games. The player chooses the field and the amount of innings that the pick-up games will be held for.

The trivia game actually offers an image of a board game, perhaps making All-Star Baseball 2005 the only video game not related to a board game that features a board game mode. In the trivia game, two players play against each other. The computer picks up cards from a "stack of cards" placed on the board, in a somewhat similar way to the cards and the board used in Monopoly. Players must then correctly answer the question behind each card. If the player is wrong, that represents one out. If the player is right, he or she gets a "hit", and the computer determines whether the hit was a single, double, triple or home run. Every time a player gets a "hit" by answering a question correctly, the computer places a chess figure on board, and the figure moves to the corresponding base, depending on what the computer determines. Before this game, players also choose what level of competition they want, and how many "innings" is the trivia game going to be played for.

2005

All-Star Baseball 2005 features a variety of things that most previous versions did not include, such as old players like Babe Ruth, Yogi Berra and others. Apart from each of the MLB teams, the game also features teams made up with legends of different eras and the 2004 American and National league teams. One particular game charasteristic is that it includes the Montreal Expos, which changed their name to the Washington Nationals for the 2005 MLB season. Barring the possibility of another team being named the Montreal Expos in the future, All-Star Baseball 2005 will be the last game in the All-Star Baseball series with that team.

It should be noted that Barry Bonds does not appear in All-Star Baseball 2005, because he is not a member of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Instead of him, the San Francisco Giants have a make believe player named "Wes Mailman". "Mailman" actually announces himself on one of the billboards at the Philadelphia Phillies home games. The game does feature play by play commentary by Arizona Diamondbacks television broadcaster Thom Brennaman and former major league player Steve Lyons, who sometimes offers long answers to Brennaman's questions during games.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for All-Star Baseball ]

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