All-Star Baseball 2000

Developer: Iguana Entertainment Publisher: Acclaim

Released: April 8, 1999 Rated: E 7/10

I admit, I was a bit surprised during my research to see just how much professional reviews improved between All-Star Baseball ‘99 and its immediate follow-up. It’s certainly a good yearly update, wisely without any major overhauls, but with the benefit of seeing what some of its competition would be up to concerning stateside releases. Mike Piazza’s Strike Zone from GT Interactive had released and flopped hard, while Nintendo had brought out the big guns with Angel Studios’ Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr. While the market would get a little bit more crowded in 1999 with efforts from EA and Konami on the way, the path to continued success by Acclaim was clear: double down on the realism, management, and simulation style that stat nerds were drawn to baseball for, and that had separated them from Nintendo’s initial release.

It’s still a phenomenal looking game, even more so now with the boost from the Expansion Pak. Textures are pretty solid, differences between stadiums tend to jump out a bit more and sell the individuality of the ballparks. Individual players have some recreations of their batting stances and animations, and player models have a solid amount of detail. This doesn’t apply to every player, however, just some of the bigger names that would have come up first – see a below shot of Craig Counsell in the batter’s box for the Marlins without the bat over his head like he’s chopping wood – but the addition of detail and the march towards exact copies of the look and feel of the sport are still being added year over year. And while this would eventually lead to gargantuan file sizes, tedious updates, and no time for any real improvement in between releases in more recent years, the improvements we see from them in a vacuum can still go down as a net positive.

Game modes and features would remain largely the same in this second iteration, though more roster management options like moving players within teams’ farm systems was a noted addition. The player creation modes also returned from ‘99 to flesh out roster control, but Iguana Entertainment made its main strides improving All-Star Baseball in the graphical department. Better motion capture work was the main focus, leading to a detail-oriented sense of evolution in animations and player models. Running, swinging, pitching, and batting stances are small improvements to the average player, but in the world of sports games they make all the difference given the genre’s ability to represent tangible photorealism and lifelike animation in the graphics. Reviewers marked this down and adjusted their scores accordingly back in 1999, and All-Star Baseball 2000 staked its claim to baseball supremacy in a way that only EA and Nintendo were often able to do in the extremely crowded sports genre of the late-’90s