A good, but not good enough, baseball simulation
When it comes to sport sims, the latest and the greatest is always best, but if you want to take a trip down memory lane and experience how a baseball electronic game felt at the beginning of the 90s, this is a good game to choose from. However, when I say good, I really don't mean highly playable or entertaining. What I mean is that the game was the best there was at the time, but unfortunately that doesn't account to much today. The problems are multiple. The control scheme is absolutely abominable. That has to do with the fact that the game isn't really optimized for keyboard and mouse. Instead, to get anything out of this title you will be required to invest in a gamepad and even then spend a long time familiarizing yourself with the controller. The graphics sure look nice enough, and for a DOS game they won't disappoint. However, especially when you're pitching the low resolution will feel inappropriate. Most portions of the game are treated as micro arcade games and coupled with your players skills, you will be even more frustrated when you will have to adjust and then readjust again when players change, since they add their level of uncertainly to the actual micro game mechanics. Unfortunately this was the state of baseball sims back in 1992, and later on the series managed to learn a few more lessons about game design. Hardball 5 was the series breakthrough in a sense, though not a perfect game either, but for the time being this was the best baseball sim.
