The best Baseball game to ever appear on the Nintendo 64 is back defend its title. All-Star Baseball 2000 is easily the best this year so far. In fact its not likely anything will come out that will beat this Acclaim Sports legend. All-Star 2000 is everything All-Star '99 was and better. Better graphics right out of the box plus pumped up high-rez graphics with the Nintendo expansion pack.
The graphics displayed in All-Star Baseball 2000 are just breath taking. You have never seen stadiums look this real with this much detail in a video game before. All-Star '99 featured picture perfect stadiums, 2000 has added detailed people in the stands. In most video game sport titles the audience is either a color test pattern or very blurry flat people. All-Star Baseball 2000 has detailed fan in the stands. These folks can be seen clearly from the distance of the pitchers mound. You can even see the players sitting on the bench. When it comes to detail this game goes way beyond the jumbo trinatron screen. These players are so fine and smooth. You can make out more detail in this game than if you watched one on T.V.
All-Star Baseball 2000 brings back Acclaim Sports exclusive face capture technology so you can actually recognize a player instead of just reading who a player is. Sammy Sosa comes walking on the field with that famous Sammy smile. The down size to the face detail is the players always have the same expression on their faces no matter what is going on in the game. You get struck out and still smiling.
The sound quality in All-Star 2000 is its worst feature. Yes, it sounds great. The dual announcers beats Triple Play 64, but they're no fun to listen to. They say the same comments over and over again, with the same tone. All-Star has always had a live in the stands format versus Triple Play's T.V. style presentation which does make a difference. But I plea to Acclaim to perhaps put some enthusiasm into the announcers next year. Put some color into this black and white commentary.
PUBLISHER: ACCLIAM
GRAPHICS: 10 MUSIC & SOUND: 7.5 CONTROL: 9
SECRETS: 8 ORIGINALITY: 7 FUN & REPLAY: 10
OVERALL: 9.5