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'Officially endorsed by' is the surest way of getting a sports game to sell. R.B.I. Baseball 2 is sponsored by the Major League Baseball Players - and while most of us will go round thinking that Charlie Sheen and Corbin Berensen have finally put their names to a computer game based on the hit film, only Americans and die-hard fans of the sport will know about the real-life MLBP.

Still, film licence or not, The Kremlin's simulation of the most popular sport in the U. S. of A. (yes, even more popular than American Football) attempts to recreate all of the action that takes place over the nine innings, while still keeping the overall sense of fun that's sadly missing from other companies' attempts.

Choosing from any of the 26 Major League teams across America (each with its own ist of the real team players and statistics) your aim, as with most sport sims, is to end the season at the top of the league.

Just looking at R.B.I. Baseball 2, you'd think that the Kremlin's design brief was to include as many small touches as possible, then design a game around them. Every man on the field seems to have his own small 'life'. As they wait for the action to start, some look around at the. crowds, some stamp their feet, some spit on the floor and so on. When a player tries to steal a base, dust piles up around him as he slides and if he fails to make it the umpire throws his arms apart screaming 'OUT!'.

The cheerleaders get frantic as their team is winning, the crowd roars when a home run is hit, the list is almost endless. Another of the really nice features is the animated scoreboard: the quality of the cartoons is superb on the instant replays and the digital read-outs are just as realistic as the real things.

Into every life a little rain must fall, and in every game a little fault must be found. R.B.I. Baseball 2 suffers from a disease that seems to strike most sports games - initial difficulty. It takes quite a while before you're able to really judge the correct time to swing the bat (even on the Little League setting) - until then it's a case of pot luck (except that when you do hit a ball, obviously you meant to. Yeah, right, of course you did). In a nutshell, R.B.I. 2 is one of the finest baseball games yet released (in fact, one of the better sports sims of any type). One might even say it knocks the opponents for six... sorry, wrong country.