Day 135: All-Star Weekend 2008 with Tommy Lasorda Baseball

You know how I'm alway bitching that I never know which randomly chosen fielder I'm controlling in most baseball video games? Well Tommy Lasorda Baseball solves that problem and gives me something brand new to bitch about: the robot voice that yells out which fielder is active every time a ball is hit into play. It doesn't completely solve the problem, since it's still hard to tell which little guy is which sometimes on the extremely jumbled fielding screen.


Let's see, here we have six members of the pitching team, two umpires, two base coaches, three base runners and three more base runners on the field map in the bottom right corner of the screen. Notice how it looks like there's a man running from first to home about to collide with the batter running to first? That's not confusing at all in the heat of the game.

Tommy Lasorda is a pretty average representative of the last generation of baseball games before they were all replaced with baseball simulators. Pitch movement is still controlled using the d-pad rather than just selecting curve or slider and aiming. There are no real teams. No real players. No real stadiums. No real stats. In other words, Tommy Lasorda Baseball looks and plays like pretty much every other 8-bit and 16-bit baseball game out there.


That's not necessarily a bad thing. The game moves fast and is easy to figure. It feels familiar because it is. Tommy Lasorda Baseball lacks both the personality of earlier games like Bad News Baseball and the realism and depth of later games like the MVP and MLB series. It's sort of stuck somewhere in between the baseball game and the baseball simulator.