Wii Baseball Impressions

Wii Baseball is another game with much of the sport removed. There are only two teams, yours and your opponent’s. All you do is hit and pitch. Games are three innings long, and all baserunning and fielding is handled automatically. It is fun to play, but at times the results feel kind of random.

While pitching, you can choose a bunch of different pitches: fastball, curve, splitter, and screwball. You can also choose the location of the pitch. Changing locations, speeds, and pitches seems to increase your odds of getting an out. While batting, you’ll hit the ball somewhere as long as you swing at the right time, but I don’t see a correlation between swing location and pitch location, and the results of hitting seemed quite random. Bat speed clearly matters, however. Swing fast and time it right and you’ll hit it hard somewhere.

Baseball, like tennis, is one of the games where I haven’t quite clued in to the control nuances of the game yet. One game I can throw 94mph fastballs at will; the next game I’m in the 65mph range. One game I’ll rack up five strikeouts in three innings, the next game the first five batters will get on base. I feel like I’m doing the same thing in each game, but for some reason my performance is spotty. Batting feels more accurate but is fairly arcade-like.

I’ve also found baseball to be a tough game. I’m currently in the 400-point range, and my opponents are quite tough. I lost my last game 7-4, and struggled mightily to get any sort of rally going. I can only imagine what’s going to happen when I get up in the 800-point range, if I make it that far.