Baseball Superstars 2010

It’s become a well worn cliché in Britain to ridicule the US for its lack of interest in association football. But as the current World Cup has shown, Americans are savvier to the beautiful game than we like to think they are.

In fact, given that the nearest we Brits get to an appreciation of baseball is a game of rounders in a park, I’d say that Americans are far more attuned to our national sport then we are to theirs.

Fortunately, Baseball Superstars 2010 from Gamevil does what all the best sports games manage to achieve – it remains a fun and valid proposition even if you have no interest in the subject sport.

It does this primarily by offering up a charming and accessible version of baseball. Batting is a simple case of timing – just press a virtual button (or a physical one if you’re using a phone with a slidey keyboard like our Milestone) when the ball reaches you.

Pitching involves selecting one of five styles (four attributed to the virtual D-pad while leaving it alone selects a fast ball) before selecting a direction.

Fielding is as simple as selecting which base to throw to, with all four attributed to a direction on the D-pad.

This simplicity does occasionally cause you to question the precise level of skill involved – it’s hard to know exactly what you did differently for a home run hit, for example – but fortunately there’s plenty going on elsewhere to distract you.

Most obvious is the slick anime-influenced style of the game. The characters are super-deformed, as if they wandered out of Gamevil’s own RPG Zenonia, with elite super players (you get to select one each for batting and pitching before each game) resembling Dragon Ball characters more than real life baseball stars.

Then there’s the wealth of gameplay modes on offer. Season mode, Exhibition, and the bite-sized Homerun Race and Mission (where you have to complete a series of brief challenges) modes all vie for your time, but it’s My League mode that inevitably wins out.

Here you create your own player (either batter or pitcher) and take him through a whole baseball career. In between games (which mercifully skip to each instance of your involvement) you can train and upgrade your player, or even send him out on a date to relax.

Along with the accompanying story, this serves to lend the game an RPG-like edge that will appeal to anyone who’s enjoyed levelling up a video game character before. I’m guessing that’s just about everyone.

It’s true that if you’ve played the 2009 edition to death you might not find much new here. Chief among the tweaks and additions is the asynchronous multiplayer mode, which isn’t quite as exciting as it sounds.

All you do here is download a friend’s team, which you can then play against in normal fashion. Still, it’s a nice addition that’s bound to extend the game’s already considerable life span for many.

The only other criticism I’d level at Baseball Superstars 2010 is that there’s still a little too much esoteric terminology and meaningless (to baseball-ignorant people like me anyway) stats. Gamevil has done so much to make the game accessible to all, so it feels a little jarring to be confronted with a messy stream of letters and numbers from time to time.

Still, as a package Baseball Superstars 2010 manages to transcend the sport it’s based around, offering up a real gamer’s game that can be enjoyed even by us ignorant Brits.