As I begin playing Backyard Baseball 2003 I’m having one of those moments where something I loved as a kid proving to be...odd. I noticed a “forget about it” line in the Italian girl’s profile. Okay, not a biggie. I next heard the child version of Japanese superstar Ichiro ask “do they sell rice balls here?” Huh, yeah that’s a little off-putting. Then a child by the name of Amir Khan yells “Alalalalalalalalala” several times throughout a single game. Maybe it’s just a bad attempt of him singing, as Amir’s shtick is that he’s into music, but I fail to see how the developers wouldn’t notice.
Backyard Baseball is a weird one. It has the level of diversity you’d expect of a kid’s game. Hispanic, Asian, girls, black, and physically disabled are all here. But yeah, it’s kinda like they just make stereotypes of a lot of them. Some in a way you’d expect of kid’s entertainment, as making complex characters would go over their heads. Others, more ire deserving than an eye-roll. All that said, I don’t hate it. In fact, I still like it. The game that is. The naive stereotyping is a different issue. At its core, Backyard Baseball 2003 is an enjoyable, arcady sports game.
The presentation and usability is top notch. It’s quick to get through the menus and into an actual game. Despite there being a ton of UI on screen, something I usually hate, all of it has a cohesive style. They play into being a happy medium between a sports sims like The Show, and arcady baseball of yore. It sticks to the idea of sports being fun. Silly power-ups like the undergrounder that sends any hit tunneling into the ground and popping up in a random location. Or a spitball pitch that literally trails spit as it comes across the plate. Though some of that style does get in the way in unskippable plate approaches, repetitive field chatter, and the painfully slow trot around the bases after a home run.
I recently tried to start up a franchise is The Show 16 only to get one game in and exclaim a big old “NOPE.” Even with the notion of just playing four or five games each calendar month of the season seems insane. I like my sports games to be manageable. To feel the progression of a season, and command as the coach, GM, owner or whatever. Again, Backyard Baseball has that, in a way I’ve not gotten from a baseball game in some time.
Much to my surprise, the visuals hold-up fairly well too. The hand drawn animation does much for it. Characters at a distance don’t look great, but the fields and close-up models are good given their age.
My first career aspirations as a child were to be a professional baseball player. I was a passionate Seattle Mariners fan and a Ken Griffey Jr. fanboy. Backyard Baseball 1997 is where my enjoyment of the series began, because I was still naive, but the 2003 rendition which was the second to include professional players, is my favorite. It’s an easy to handle sports game. A genre I wish I had more reasons to get into, but the simulation can be daunting at times. I’d love to see more baseball games of this style, unfortunately the RBI reboot is horrendous. Absolutely horrendous. But not as horrendous as the frequency at which the kids of Backyard Baseball say “we want a batter, not a broken ladder.” *** that. *** the kids who say it. *** the person who wrote that line.