Backyard Baseball '09 (Wii)

As a kid, Backyard Baseball was one of my favorite video games.  The original, released in 1997, was a great, fun alternative to the more serious baseball "sim" games such as All Star Baseball, Triple Play Baseball, and Ken Griffey Junior baseball.  It consisted of 30 neighborhood kids, with different skills and distinctly different personalities.  Since the addition of professional players (albeit kid versions of them), the series has slowly been losing its backyard charm and becoming an over-simplified baseball game without the fun it started with.

When you start up the game the menu gives you 8 options to choose from.  Play Now, Pickup Game, Tournament, Season Game, Home Run Derby, All-Star Game, Extras, and Options.  "Play Now" randomly chooses players and a field automatically so you can start playing...now.  Pickup game allows you to choose your players and field, but is a single game.  Tournament allows you to create an 8 bracket tournament from the Major League teams and play/simulate the games you want until the end of the tournament.  Season game allows you to create a team and play through a 16/32 game season.  It is this mode that you can unlock players and fields.  Home Run Derby is a home run hitting contest where you can choose players and a field to compete with.  All Star Game seems to randomly choose players from the Major League Teams to make an American League versus National League all star game.  Extras brings you to a menu where you can find information about the players, all time records, your trophies, the game's controls, credits, and watch the intro movie. Options lets you change the sound volume and various attributes about the game rules.

I will use Season Game mode to describe the rest of the game, as it covers everything the other modes cover.  When you select Season Game you create a new Team.  You then get to choose from the Major League teams or from various Backyard Baseball teams.  If you choose a Backyard Baseball team you can choose one Major League team to replace in the league.  You then pick your home field.  You can select from 6 fields initially, and there are 2 additional fields you can unlock.  This, in my opinion, is a rather underwhelming number, seeing that the original Backyard Baseball (1997!!) had about that many as well.

After you choose your home field, you go to the "Pick Players" screen, which is very un-friendly looking.  I hate to keep going back to the original, but picking teams from 30 kids on a bench is much more fun than picking from a long bland menu.  The list initially is in alphabetical order, with the backyard kids and pros mixed in, and various pros locked for no particular reason at all.  You have the ability to change the sort options, and the buttons you use to do that are two totally ambiguous white squares.  Through trial and error I have discovered that these are Z and B, but the game does not indicate this AT ALL.  Also, after a general look-over of the stats, the professional players are significantly better than the neighborhood kids, which makes it kind of silly to choose anyone but a team of pros.  Clicking 2 will give you a short blurb about the player.  When you select a player it marks them off on the selection screen, but there is no way to see a summary of the players you picked, making it unnecessarily difficult to look at your team and decide what other kinds of players you need.

You also have the option to create a player, and I can honestly say this is one of the worst attempts at player creation I have ever seen.  You can choose from player types (contact hitter, power hitter, fielding wiz, 5-tool, custom hitter, power pitcher, junk pitcher, custom pitcher), 6 of which are pre-set stats and two are customizable.  There are 3 body types (husky, regular, and skinny) which, for some inexplicable reason, cause your player to wear pants, shorts, or capris, respectively.  You can choose from a narrow or a wide head (called 1 and 2), 5 gradually darker skin tones, 3 kinds of mouths and eyes (which I can't tell the difference between), 8 generic and boring hairstyles, and hair color (black, brown 1 through brown 6, red 1 through red 3, bonde 1 and 2).  It's hard to believe that they couldn't come up with more descriptive hair colors than "brown 1, brown 2, brown 3, brown 4, brown 5, brown 6".  There are 14 styles of pants (called 1-14) and 10 styles of shoes (called 1-10).  You can choose your uniform number, 1-99, except you can only go up or down by ONE at a time.  It took me FIFTY seconds to go from 1 to 99.  You can customize your player's stats, but there are 5 attributes with 10 levels each, and you only get 30 attribute points.  This essentially means that your player can be mediocre at everything, or great at something and bad at everything else.  Pitching is essentially the same - you get 30 points if you choose a "pitcher" type and to distribute them between 4 pitches that means they are either going to be all mediocre or some great and some useless.

After you choose your team, you get to the Season Menu, which allows you to play a game, view your schedule, view your team's stats, manage your players, view your milestones, or access the same options menu.  In the management screen, you can select your players fielding and batting positions, as well as add unlocked players or trade with other teams.

The actual GAME is extremely simple.  When pitching, you use the directional pad to select a pitch, and them aim with the joystick and pitch by either pressing A or flicking the remote forward.  To bat, you select power, contact, bunt left, or bunt right, and then flick forward or press A when you want to swing.  When you earn a power pitch/hit you can activate it by pressing Z and then selecting it from the directional pad.  The directional arrows are assigned to bases for both throwing and running.  When you're playing defense, and the ball is hit, your players chase it automatically until you use the joystick to direct them, at which point you have to make them run to the ball.

In general, the game feels rushed and un-polished.  This is most noticeable in the menus.  Some of the menus can be controlled by the joystick and the d-pad, and some of the menus can be controlled ONLY by the d-pad.  When you are using the joystick to select options and all of a sudden it doesn't work, and you have to use the d-pad instead, it is not only frustrating but also terribly confusing.  Also, the music in the menus is on an approximately 10 second loop which, after a few minutes of creating a character or making a team, caused me to mute the television in anger.

While the gameplay IS simple and enjoyable as an alternative from other hardcore baseball sims, it is a little over-simplified, even more so than the older backyard baseball games.  Besides the controls, in updating the game to 3D and expanding it to include MLB teams and professional players, the game has lost its "backyard" charm.  In the original, the 30 players all had unique dialogue every time they stepped up to the plate, and really had personalities and unique looks.  The pitcher's stamina was represented by "juice" in a juicebox.  You chose teams from kids standing on the bleachers begging you to pick them. Now that the game has dropped the cartoon look and adopted low-quality 3D, all of the characters look like something I could make as a Mii.  I would hope that Humongous Entertainment has a more powerful modeling tool than that.  They have no personality, and the MLB license doesn't make up for it.

If you have a Wii, you have Wii Baseball.  Save yourself the money and play that instead.