I’m a big baseball fan who loves to try new baseball games—so naturally I was thrilled to be able to review the latest game in the All-Star Baseball series. In this review, I’ll be breaking this game down to its roots and letting you baseball fans (and non baseball fans) whether or not you should either buy this game immediately—or even refuse a rental. I recommend you to keep reading if your interest is burning with an all-star anticipation.

When this year’s All-Star Baseball rendition is compared to last year’s, the graphics are immediately seen as a huge difference. The most notable difference in the graphics this year is the player’s faces. Last year, the faces seemed “pasted on” and most of the time, were not even close to resembling their real-life counterparts. This year though, Acclaim has learned from their mistake—the faces look amazingly better. Most of the faces this year look authentic to the real-life players, and they look a lot richer in detail. The players themselves look a lot like last year’s models, but then again, last year’s models looked very good. This year’s models just improve on the old ones, a lot. The textures, most noticeably in the player’s outfits and the grass, look very crisp and clear. One problem in the graphics is the most definitely the crowd. It’s all pretty much of bunch of GIF’s that do meager 3 frame animations, but hey it’s still got a better crowd than any other baseball game out on the market.

The All-Star Baseball series is not known for being an arcade style baseball game, and All-Star Baseball 2004 is far from an arcade title. The batting interface is complicated, and at times frustrating. The pitches come extremely fast, which requires VERY quick reactions. Not to mention that the batting cursor moves quite slowly, when compared to the speed of the pitch. The game gives you the option to manually field the ball in play, assist you with it, or just automatically do the entire fielding for you. I have tried all three options and by far, manual is the best. Not because it is the most honest, but because it is the most reliable. For instance, with assisted fielding, it sometimes throws the ball to the wrong base. Although having these options is welcome, it just wasn’t executed as well as it should have been. With that said, All-Star Baseball 2004 is a fairly fun game to play. The game is jam-packed with options and features. The most notable is definitely the franchise mode. This mode allows you to create your own team and try to bring theme to fame and glory. The only drawback here is that it requires an ENTIRE 251 memory card to save!