The Bigs 2 (Xbox 360)
Going. Going. Going. Going. Still going. Still going. Write if you get work, Baseball!!!
7/8/2009 6:57 PM | 4 Comments | Page 1 of 3
What's Hot: Sequel to one of Jones' personal favorite sports games of all time; Home Run Pinball = one of the best mini-games you will ever play; Deeper, richer single-player experience
What's Not: Uneven difficulty; AI makes far too many Legendary Catches; Some stupid, utterly useless "training" mini-games
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
One of the most prestigious honors I can bestow on any game is designating it a Disc That's Never More Than Five Feet Away From My TV at Any Time. (Colloquially known as the DTNMTFFAFMTVAAT Award.)
The Bigs, oddly enough, was one of those discs.
The game was the perfect late-night, just-getting-in, don't-want-to-think-too-much, I've-had-too-many-beers experience. It was always just challenging enough to make me feel like I was doing something interesting and, ideally, exciting. Unlike other sports games, I didn't have to monkey around with rosters or worry about draft days, or how much I'd charge for the average seat in the upper deck. It was pure. It was baseball
sans the bullshit. Unlike other sports games, I could load up the game and instantly get a tangible payoff.
If you get a ball by Jeter, e-mail me, and tell me what that feels like in great detail. I'd like to know.
I logged so many hours with
The Bigs that I'm surprised the disc didn't move out to a nearby hotel and get a restraining order against me. I really put that thing through the mill.
Aside from my friend John in Boston (hi, John), I knew of no one who played the original game. Which is why I was slack-jawed when 2K announced -- surprise! -- a few months back that a sequel was in the works. Hell, they even
took Teti and me out to a Mets game and demoed
The Bigs 2 for us there -- in what was
one of the greatest days of my life.
Ever since, I've been playing
The Bigs 2 in various alpha and beta incarnations over the past few months. A few days ago, I got my hands on the final boxed version. (They've got the Brewers' Prince Fielder on the box cover. Nice. I like Fielder. He's one of those professional athletes who's clearly comfortable with his potbelly.)
That ball is gone, son. And it's never a-coming back again.
The heart of any baseball videogame, the core of the drama, is what happens between the batter and the pitcher.
The Bigs had probably the cleanest batter-pitcher battles in gaming history. And
The Bigs 2 preserves that tradition. Getting a pitch by a batter, or taking a ball at plate, gives your team a couple of squares of Turbo.
It's this simple rule -- this constantly see-sawing quest for Turbo -- that forces pitchers to throw strikes, and forces batters to swing the bat. The result: Sh*t happens constantly. Full counts? They don't exist in the game. The pitcher challenges the hitter; the hitter challenges the pitcher. The game moves along with a great deal of alacrity. Everybody is happy.
Collisions at the plate are detrimental to any expensive dental work you might have had done.
2K includes a new "Wheelhouse" dynamic in
The Bigs 2. Each batter has a Wheelhouse: a hot zone at the plate that typically results in a moon shot, should the batter connect with a pitch there. The Wheelhouse is represented as a pulsing red area within the strike zone, and its size is proportional to the skill of the batter. Ichiro's strike zone, for example, is pretty much one big, red, pulsating zone. You'll have to paint the corners, as they say, to get anything by him.
