Gaming: Baseball Superstars 2011, First Impressions

Baseball Superstars 2011, released earlier this month for iPhone and iPod Touch, is another in the Baseball Superstars franchise begun by Gamevil in 2007.

I acquired the game this past Friday and will be reviewing various aspects of it over the course of the next week or two.

In this dispatch, I’ll provide my first impressions of the game and some comments on the Exhibition mode.

First Impressions
You might have guessed, owing both to the Asian people and the Asian other things in the video above, that this game is deeply influenced — aesthetically, at least — by Asian cartoons. I’m tempted to say “Japanese” cartoons (as Strong Bad does in the video below), except for Gamevil is actually a Korean-based company, and I think it’s right and good to celebrate all our Asian brothers and sisters.

Whether for these aesthetic considerations, or for other reasons entirely, the game can be overwhelming at first. There are no less than seven options on the main menu — including Exhibition, My League, Season, and something called Mission. The literature for the game suggests that the My League mode “contains unique RPG elements in a sports title,” which sounds intriguing. It also says that Mission Mode “demands finest skills.” That’s unfortunate, of course, for those of us who possess only middling skills.

Like many swords, this is the double-edged kind. On the one hand, the number of options for play are alot for a newcomer to comprehend; on the other, if one measure of a quality game is that it can be played for some time, then the myriad options bode well for this.

Exhibition Game
After selecting Exhibition, the user is brought to a Team Selection screen. Each team is rated on four traits: Pitching, Batting, Focus, and Tenacity. It’s hard to say what the last two mean. It’s also hard to determine what a “good” rating is right away. The Dragons, for example, have a 365 rating in Pitching, a 440 for Batting, a 430 for Focus, and a 365 for Tenacity. Those scores, of course, have no objective meaning; there’s no such thing as a 365-rated pitcher in the Major Leagues. As such, it becomes a question for the user to figure out what’s good and what’s not.

In terms of gameplay, once again it can be overwhelming at first — mostly because the default game speed is quite fast. I found that once I adjusted the speed to about half, the game became quite accessible. (A moral note: while, yes, I’ll play the slower version of the game to start with, please do not suppose for a second that I would feel satisfied to “beat” the game at this slower speed. A Cistulli has standards, ya know.)

Gameplay is pretty straightforward. To hit, one just taps the Swing icon on the screen. Fielding is (mostly?) automatic. Users control only the throws that fielders make, and that’s done by tapping a directional pad. Pitching is, once again, rather simple. Each pitcher throws four or five pitches. After a user selects one of these, it’s merely a matter of using the d-pad to select the location of the pitches. The presence of the Shuuto adds no little pleasure to the game.