Base running is confusing at best, with a myriad of different buttons to push and places to point the Wii remote in order to advance single or multiple runners. The manual included with the game is incredibly brief and does not delve into important points, like how to slide, leaving the player with no choice but to attempt to find the controls out for themselves or hunt through the tips and tricks available in-game.
Defense is somewhat more straightforward and less frustrating. The pitching mechanism is easy to understand and requires relatively little time to perfect. The simulator does become distressing however with the incredible change of pace many pitchers have between their windup and stretch deliveries. It may be that this is accurate, but the change is certainly jarring and leads to more than a few meatballs being tossed at batters with runners on base.
This last problem would be far more forgivable if the instructions for the player to wall climb (or make a jumping catch) tended to result in a wall climb (or a jumping catch) and not one's outfielder diving head first into the wall. There are moments when the game performing the move does result in a jump, but all too often the outfielder ends up splayed out on the grass as a ball just barely gets over the wall (this is made all the more frustrating by the computer's wall-climbing to save homeruns on a regular basis).
As if those problems weren't enough, the graphics are distinctly disappointing. It would be kind to call them "previous generation-like," particularly as players' faces were far more recognizable on All-Star Baseball 2003 on the Gamecube than they are here.
Things are not helped by the camera angles here, as catchable foul pop-ups are regularly made uncatchable because the game opts to show the ball going way up into the air as opposed to showing the field. This makes it impossible to direct a defensive player to get underneath the ball because the defensive player is not visible (and there are no helpful arrows to point the way either).
As for the menus, the setup screens entering a specific game allegedly allow one to change the weather conditions and stadium, but no combination of button pushing in any combination seems to alter the conditions, or change the stadium (which the screen should do too). The anemic manual is no help here as it does not even discuss the game setup screen and the in-game help is equally useless. It also doesn't help that these game setup screens require the "+" button to advance where the rest of the game uses the "A" button. It is almost as though the game shipped without the menus being made fully functional.
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