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World Series Baseball 2K3 Review - Xbox

Any sports fanatic knows that a good sports videogame is hard to put down. Sport games just seem to have that appeal and WSB2k3 is that kind of game.

I have played around 7 games, and simulating 3 entire seasons to see how the stats kept up. I was looking to see how realistic and accurate they were at the end of the season and I found that indeed the stats did live up to the real life stats. I believe that this is one of the hardest things for video baseball games to accomplish. The average joe may not appreciate the level that stats are regarded, however for any true sports fanatic, stats are one of the key factors in a good sports game.

Last years effort was a good one but unintelligent AI hampered the overall fun of WSB. This year the AI is I'm glad to say both agressive, and intelligent! I almost wet my pants when I saw the computer controlled base runner that was on 2nd base try to slide and make it home from a blooper up the middle into shallow center field. What was even more impressive is the base runner slammed into my catcher as soon as I threw the ball to home plate! Of course my catcher hung on or I would of benched him!

Another example of the AI is when I had Bonds up at bat with a man on first and second. The pitcher throws two outside balls to Bonds then intentionally walked Barry Bonds to set up a force out on all bases in the 8th Innings. Any baseball fan knows that this is how you deal with this type of situation in baseball and the computer AI knew this. This to me was amazing and I've never seen such AI in a baseball video game before.

Gameplay

Gameplay is fine tuned this year, much much better then last year. Not to say that last year's effort sucked, but it had holes and some major bugs. Sega/Visual Concepts have however appeared to fix many of these issues in this release. No longer is there stupid AI, it is both smart and aggressive. Also been fixed is the ability to jump walls to snag homers off the wall which is definitely nice. Another improvement is the overall feel of smoothness in the game. If you played ASB or even last years WSB there was a feeling of everything not flowing on the same level; this is no longer the case, this game plays and feels like a dream in all departments

Double plays are fun to execute and the base runner is easy to control as well as playing the field. The ball park isn't HUGE like in ASB, it just seems perfect and accurate for players to move around and make important plays when needed. Like i said, the game feels polished this time and what a joy it is ... (continued next page)