Okay, so our team is at least looking good, but how do they play? Well, as much as I hate to say this, I had more control of
Bases Loaded for the NES than I did with
High Heat. That's not to say it's unplayable, but rather there's so much more that has been done in other baseball games that, for one reason or another, seem to have been omitted from this one.
Pitching is done rather nicely. Pressing A makes your pitcher throw a fast ball, and in order to throw different balls, such as a Slider or Curveball, you must press and hold the D-pad in the corresponding direction on the pitching interface. While this is easy to use and gets the job done, I had issues with the placement of some of the pitches on the interface. The pitches in the cardinal directions (N, S, E, W) are easy to use, but the pitches located on the diagonals (NE, SW, etc...) are sometimes hard to pull off with the small GBA D-pad. Considering most pitchers had less than four pitches, it would have been great if you were left to just the four cardinal directions. After you select your pitch, you can choose where you can throw it, and just how much pitching room you have depends on how good your pitcher is. I was really upset to see that you couldn't pick off runners or bean the batter.
When you first start the game, Automatic Fielding is turned on, which is great for players like myself who at times don't feel like playing every position. I preferred playing with this turned on mostly because of the GBA's screen size and at times, the ball was hard to see. You can turn this off in the Options menu if you want though.
On the other side of the bat, thing aren't so rosy. You can only bat for strength (which admittedly doesn't amount to much), and have no control over bat placement or batter position. You are only allowed to swing and bunt. There's no stealing bases, no squeeze plays, diving for balls; I could go on with what you can't do but I don't want to bore you.
Oh, and forget about home runs - they are about as common as a Jerry Springer episode without a fight. In my first season with the A's, I was only able to hit three, which is strange considering I had Jason Giambi on my team. The computer was able to hit more though, and always happened to get one just when it's team needed one, which brought up that whole computer cheating thing - but players should be used to that by now.
High Heat offers the standard game modes for a baseball game. You can play in an Exhibition game, participate in Batting Practice, Home Run Derby (HA!), a Season mode in which you can choose from 16, 81, and 162 game seasons, and Playoffs. Read over that list again, see something missing? Thought so; Multi-Player. High Heat would have benefited so much (and gotten a few more points) had link cable support been added.
