Baseball Stars Professional, besides having an impossible to remember name, was originally a baseball title for the NEOGEO in 1990. This is basically a straight port of that game for the PS3, with some added features like network play to spice things up just slightly. It's arcade baseball action at its purest with some noticeably Japanese additions that make it colorful and functional, but not really worth the $9 price tag unless you have an emotional attachment to the original game.
This game follows the same formula most 2D baseball games do, just like every one of those you may have played on the SNES or Genesis growing up. There are, in fact, dozens of flash games free online that will provide the exact same gameplay as this title, and perhaps even with better graphics. However, this title has some Japanese character to it that gives it a bit of individuality. There are a lot of teams, not from any real league but organized by different oddball concepts. There's the Comic Astroboys, a team made up of Astro Boy references, the Creative Brains, all named after historical inventors and thinkers, and other funny ideas along those lines. There are even two female teams to break up the monotony of identical male players.
This game does seem to be a bit harder than normal, however, unless you're using an especially good team like the American Dreams. Pitching's no problem, just pipe fastballs over the inside corner most of the time and never, ever throw your slowest pitch, or else the computer will knock it out of the park three times out of four. When hitting, I can't seem to do much more than get consistent contact, grounding or popping out virtually every time up. This leads to a lot of games in which the computer beats me 1-0 with a single home run, and I hardly get three guys on base at once. It's frustrating, and maybe the issue is the learning curve, but I certainly haven't worked it out to this point.
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