High Heat Baseball 2000 Review

“The Best Baseball Game. WE GUARANTEE IT” – 3DO

Written in bold, black letters on the cover of High Heat Baseball 2000‘s instruction manual, 3DO is confident (or cocky) that their product is the baseball title of choice on the Playstation. So are they being self-confident, or are they just self-delusional? Read on and find out!

High Heat Baseball 2000 offers six modes of play: Exhibition, Season,

Playoffs, Home Run Challenge, Quick Play, and a Family Mode. The Family mode

will allow younger gamers or players new to the game to jump right in and compete

with more experienced veterans. The game includes full general management features,

including the option to bring players up from the minors. Unfortunately, a multi-season

career mode is not included. Thirty-seven stadiums are in this game, with two

classics and five never-before-seen. Finally, over 750 MLBPA players are present,

along with 1999 rosters and comprehensive 1998 season stats for all of the players.

3DO’s internal baseball studio, Team .366, puts realism above everything else. They want to give players a true baseball experience, rather than the usual arcade action with some realistic touches that other games provide. This all starts with High Heat‘s “TruPlay” AI that produces realistic computer running, fielding, hitting, pitching, and management actions. The computer will call pitchouts every so often to keep you honest and double switches are utilized.

High

Heat‘s pitching interface provides nine different pitching types, while

the batting interface allows players to guess the pitch ahead of time. Batting

is accomplished by timing your swing and pointing the d-pad at the location

of the pitch. Pitching is pretty standard as well. You select your pitch and

location, then aim either in or out of the strike zone, depending on which button

you use to throw the pitch.

While the features listed above are great, the graphics suffer in comparison

to EA Sports’ Triple

Play 2000 and 989 Studios’ MLB

2000. The players look blocky and move unrealistically. What’s worse, batters

are only distinguished by skin color. The stadiums aren’t anything to get excited

about either. Even though there are seven extra stadiums, they just look fuzzy

and blurry. This is one of those cases where poor graphics take away from the

gameplay.

The sound in High Heat Baseball is just as unimpressive. The crowd

is barely noticeable, and the play-by-play of Ted Robinson is dull and robotic.

Don’t get me wrong – I love Robinson’s announcing during the San Francisco Giants

telecasts. He’s just incredibly boring here.

After hearing good things about High Heat Baseball 2000 for the PC, the Playstation version just disappoints. With it being released after MLB 2000 and Triple Play 2000, you would think Team .366 was holding High Heat back to see what the competition had to offer before releasing a title that would blow them out of the water. Alas, such was not the case.