Previous Next

Sport sims, don't you just love them? Yes, thought so. But don't get over-excited about this one, 'coz you really need to be a hardened baseball fan to enjoy it.

RBI 2 Baseball is a sim in which you pitch, bat, run, substitute players and eat hot-dogs - well, almost. If you're not remotely into high-speed rounders or if you don't know much about baseball, don't bother getting this one - it really is for the true baseball fan.

Once you get through the title screens, you can choose which team you want to be - check out the back of the manual before you make your choice, it has the 1989 statistics for the 28 teams. You can now edit your line-up - if you know enough about the game - and start batting. Now this is fun. In an attempt to make the game realistic and difficult enough your batter reacts as quickly as a Koala on a more than average diet of Eucalyptus leaves. Once you get to grips with these delayed reactions, however, you start hitting the balls quite regularly, but you have not much control over the direction or strength of your batting - so it's really down to luck.

Fielding is more frustrating than batting. Once you've thrown the ball at the opposing better, he hits it and you have to try to catch him out. Ha! Unlike in most sport simulations where you get to control the player closest to the ball, here you control all the players on your team at the same time. When you move up, everybody moves up keeping the same distance between each other. Not very realistic... and a real pain.

If you do manage to catch the ball when you're fielding, the batter is out, and the crowd cheets. If you catch the ball after a bounce though, you have to catch the batter out by trying to throw the ball to the baseman which the batter is running towards - you do this by hitting Fire quickly followed by the direction of the base on your joystick. Getting this right is also very fiddly and tends to be more a matter of luck than skill.

The graphics are quite good in the close-up modes, but when you're over-looking the field and trying to run after the ball, it is very difficult to judge the depth of the image, and you tend to spend most of your time diving to catch... thin air.

The sound effects are pretty pathetic and you really have to concentrate if you want to understand what the sampled voice is actually saying. There are some cute animations on the score board and there's a good "best of seven" two player mode. The team editor adds an essential function and breaks the potential monotony. Addictive if you've a baseball fan.

The close-up graphics are good and the team editing functions add an essential element for the hardened baseball fan.

Too fiddly when fielding, crap sound effects and too much luck involved.