3D Baseball for Sega Saturn
It is always interesting when a new company dives into the sports game market for the first time as you know they have to come up with something special to go up against all the big boys in the market. Well, Crystal Dynamics may not have hit a grand slam on their first at bat, but they have come pretty close! 3D Baseball for Sega Saturn is a great first time effort and their 3D platform brings a whole new aspect to a baseball video game.
The game has all the usual functions that we are used to seeing in all of the games, season, exhibition and quick play and has their own touch with features like fielding control and management options. One negative for the game is that they cannot feature real stadiums and all of the real ball players, but you will get over that pretty quickly once you see the display of the players and the fields. The graphics in this game are some of the best around.
It's a 3-D polygon baseball game with over 700 major league players who are real with their previous years states from which to choose. This game has over 5- real-life batter stances that were caught via motion-capture of the players in real poses and comes with five different camera angles that you can choose from. Standard modes apply like Exhibition and Pennant as well as General Managers Mode where the players can alter the states of their players and trade between each other to produce the ultimate team. It comes with realistic animation and has voice talents of Van Earl Wright who has over 1000 various commentary phrases.
One of the realistic features of the game is that they were able to get the voice of Van Earl Wright who adds his own special touch to the pronunciation of some of the names. It adds a touch that you just don’t see very often in sports games.
Game play is easy to catch on and makes this a great game for anyone to play. I cannot think of a game off the top of my head that also offers the camera angles that you will find in 3D Baseball for Sega Saturn. It is just as good as watching a broadcast on television. It is an extremely attractive feature of this game and is what lets us know that Sega and Crystal Dynamics are taking their sports game seriously. They have made great strides from their earlier sports games and we can only assume that they will continue to get better with their next releases.
The Sega Saturn system was very popular in Japan during this period due to a heavy sales and marketing effort by such characters like Segata Sanshiro. This was as a result of the predecessor to Sega Saturn, the Sega Mega Drive and Sega Master System which saw dismal sales figures during it's times. The Sega Saturn and the games that went with it were popular in Japan; however, sales of the system suffering in Europe and North America due to a poor sales launch, a great deal of competition from the already popular Sony PlayStation and the Nintendo 64,as well as the system having a great deal of difficulty in programming being done by third-parties and an abysmal marketing program that never saw the light of day.
At the helm at that time was Bernie Stolar who condemned games that were RPGs as not being as popular with American consumers as with overseas players in spite of the fact that Final Fantasy for PlayStation was a huge success. As a result, many of the games designed for the Sega Saturn weren’t marketed as well nor were sales that heavy.
3D Baseball by Sega Saturn is one of the more realistic baseball games every published despite all the problems that the company was having. While it was originally released as a Sega Saturn title, it really came into its own on the PlayStation. With the commentary of one of the long famous sportscasters who’s wit and color commentary adds to the game and is a real appeal to younger fans, Wright’s keynote quip in 3D Baseball remains, "Get a clue, you struck out!" makes for a great audio backdrop to the game. You are left to wonder how many times he actually faced Pedro Martinez or Randy Johnson.
Focused on bringing a new era of baseball simulation tech complete with "real time motion control" graphics to gameplay, this may make up for some less exciting entrants into the game arena like Slam 'N Jam '96.