After all, once one has been divested of the surprise of the White House and the Empire State Building and most of New York City being destroyed, the massive alien mother ship under attack by U.S. Marine jet fighters, one might believe there could be little left to witness on Celluloid. My supposition is that, after July 3rd, we shall all see for ourselves what hath been wrought. I simply hope we are not overly disappointed.
Tony La Russa Baseball 3, 1996 Edition, from Stormfront Studios for PC CD-ROM
Distributed by Electronic Arts, this baseball sim is a grand attempt at reproducing the game which incorporates the savvy of one of the finest managers in professional baseball, Tony La Russa, with the complex algorithms necessary to produce a sim that plays well as both a strategy sim and as an action game. Unfortunately, the last two season of Major League Baseball have left me wondering exactly where our once-national-pastime is heading! The loud-mouthed, ungrateful, ego-centric wretches that currently hold sway in this game have done little to ingratiate the sport to fans. And therein lies the rub for those who would produce sports sims--the fans are fairly well fed up with the nincompoops who currently populate the game. And that, my friends, diminishes my appreciation for the sport and for any element thereby associated with its environs.
We must give credit where credit is due. This baseball sim is from Stormfront Studios, whose evolution of this title has been highly professional. There are a few inconsistencies with this game that leave me somewhat ambivalent. Yet, for those who are truly intrigued by the statistical delights within professional baseball...for those who would enjoy setting up their own team and season league...this game would be hard to top.
The motion captured pitching and hitter actions are top drawer and well implemented. By the way, the best method of pitching and your batting action is via use of the keyboard, whether playing against the computer or a friend. Learning how to pitch and how to bat would be greatly facilitated if there were a "practice" mode within the game, but I was unable to locate such an area. With the Exhibition Game mode, you can set up a single game between any two teams, work your batting order, select your pitchers, and get into a duel that does not count as a league game. After five or six innings of play, I believe you shall find your control. When learning the game, a wise choice would be to have the computer control the fielding, throwing and running while you handle the pitching/hitting, depending upon whether you're on offense or defense. This game can handle every aspect of play for you, or allow you to attend to every detail from hitting to running and fielding as well as managing on-field action and off-field player drafts.
There are three announcers from whom you may select one to handle the color announcements of the game. In my humble opinion, the voice-over by Lon Simmons is the best. With the other two announcers (Mel Allen and Hank Greenwald), unless you have a PC running a CPU greater than 100MHz in speed, for some reason many of their words drop during the heat of play announcing.
The graphics for infield and outfield fielding are not as crisp as they could be, although you can establish the speed of all animations to better match your computer's, and your own playing, capabilities. That IS a nice touch and optimizes performance to match your game needs. You can also set up your own baseball universe. This universe may consist of teams already on the CD-ROM, teams you created from scratch, or a combo of both. You then establish the divisional alignments for the teams. Once this is finished, you can start your season play. Through the Play Leagues screens, you determine the number of games in the season and those games that you actually wish to play or watch. The other season games for all of the other teams are handled by the computer and you are updated as to game's outcome as the season progresses.
From the game's utilities menu you create your team. This is fun because you can use players from other established teams to build your roster, from starters to those on reserve. Before your season starts, you can also scout minor league teams to find players that could strengthen your team in some of the weaker positions. You can even call up minor league players! And the draft is also enjoyable when you play THE GM CHALLENGE. Here, you determine which teams will be handled by the computer general manager and those teams you'll control in that position. With scouting reports in hand, you approach the 40 round draft and compete against all of the other GMs.
As you can readily tell, there are a number of options with Tony La Russa Baseball 3. As I have not become involved in too many other baseball sims, rating this particular offering against other such sims would be unfair. However, as far as holding my own interest, this title certainly is above average in its presentation, far above average in regards to its various play environments, and about average in its arcade play. Certainly if you enjoy baseball sims, this is a title I feel you should investigate at your local retail store to see if it possesses the elements you want in such an offering.
I must add that at least one final game stat is suspect. At the close of the game, all of the box scores are offered to you for your review. One of the delineated items is the number of attendees at the stadium for the game. As one of my favorite teams happens to be the Oakland A's, I naturally played some games at the Oakland Coliseum. One such game was the A's against Chicago. The final box score indicated that there were 55,250 folk in attendance at the Coliseum for that game. The officials at the Oakland Coliseum must have been counting legs instead of heads!--Mudgeon
Game requirements: 486/66 or better, 8MB RAM, SVGA video, 11MB hard disk space available plus 11MB per announcer, mouse, 2x CD-ROM drive, MS-DOS 5.x.
