Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Lee Evans

Here's a list of major baseball games released for the PC in the last five years:

(crickets chirping)

While the console market has gotten yearly updates of excellent baseball series, the PC is vastly underserved.  It's not really fair, but that's the price we pay for having the most awesome gaming system EVER.

Into this gaping void has stepped MLB Dugout Heroes, a massively multiplayer baseball game willing to pick up the mantle that others have dropped.  The concept is simple: Select a team, build it up and play against other users.  Is it good?  Short review: It's not bad, and it's free.  Long review? Maybe I'm spoiled after MLB The Show, but the players in MLB Dugout Heroes look almost nothing like their real-life counterparts.  There are three body types: normal, skinny and fat.  They shunt everyone into one of those three types, even if they don't belong.  For instance, did you know that Melky Cabrera of the Yankees is just as fat as Prince Fielder of the Brewers?  According to MLB Dugout Heroes, they are.

The screen resolution can also only go up to 1024X768.  I suppose they do that so widescreen users won't have an unfair advantage, but it's baseball.  There's no advantage other than things looking a little nicer.  There are also only three baseball parks available, and what would have been a perfect opportunity for non-intrusive in-game advertising goes untouched, as a lot of the signs are just plastered with GamesCampus logos.

However, the animations aren't half bad, so it has that going for it.  On top of that, the game is free, so that mitigates a lot of complaints. About the only music worth listening to in MLB Dugout Heroes is the opening theme.  Everything else is like ear canal rape.  The announcers are grating and many times wrong about the action occurring onscreen.  (For instance, the color commentator announcing for the millionth time, "The pitcher should keep tabs on the runner."  Really?  Wow, that's some impressive work there.  How else was I supposed to know that?  Truly a font of baseball wisdom.)  The crowd's sounds were obviously recorded at a soccer match, they're on a loop, and they don't actually react to the action on screen.  The umpire is disproportionately loud and, in keeping with the rest of the sound, absolutely annoying.

In other words, once you play the game for a little bit, you'll probably start doing the same thing I did: Turn off the sound and leave your media player of choice running in the background so you can listen to something worthwhile. The control scheme from MLB Dugout Heroes is lifted almost shamelessly from MLB Power Pros.  That being said, there are far worse control schemes to steal, and Dugout Heroes chose the right scheme for pick-up-and-play controls.  Most controls are handled with either the mouse of keyboard commands.  I chose to use a combination, and it worked admirably.

For instance, when batting, you use your mouse to position where you want to swing.  A roll of the mouse's scroll wheel will allow you to select a contact swing or a power swing.  Power swings will hit harder, but you have to hit the right ball right on the nose in order to hit the ball out of the park.  When pitching, you select your pitch with a click of the mouse and aim it in the batter's box.  A pitching meter will come up when you're ready, and if you screw up the pitching meter it will either throw an obvious ball or drop a fat, easily hit pitch right down the middle.

Your fielders will go to their proper positions automatically, but you decide which base you want to throw to with the WASD keys.  You can also use Q or E to hit the cutoff man.  Baserunning is also handled with the WASD keys, with Q telling all runners to advance and E telling all runners to retreat.  Sometimes your baserunners will do something horribly stupid, like run to the next base on an obvious popup which leads to really stupid double plays.  However, most of the time, any errors that happen are the user's own, and all of the controls work really well together. In MLB Dugout Heroes, your players and team earn experience points for every game you play.  They start you on a server for rookies so that you're not getting beat up by competition several orders of magnitude better than you.  As your team plays games, they gain experience points, and you gain more experience for a win than a loss. Soon enough, you're moving up to Amateur servers and then the Pro servers, all the way up to All-Star servers.

There's a few things worth noting.  One, AL teams will have an automatic advantage, since they use the DH in this game.  I suppose it keeps down on the complexity, but I was a little disappointed about that.  Frankly, I'm still not a fan of the DH, but that's just personal preference.  If you don't have a problem with it, you'll like it.

Your players will "age" in-game.  Every player on your team starts out the same age, regardless of whether or not they're 41 years old in real life.  Once you play 50 games, the "season" is over, and all of your players age a year.  After 8 years, they retire.  There are no injuries or DLs to juggle.  Players will get fatigued and need a day off here and there, but this just affects their hitting and pitching, not necessarily their susceptibility to injury. They don't really explain all this in-game, so you're left to dig through the online manual or just make lots of mistakes with your team, like I did.

Put another way, everything in this game is designed so that you can pick up and play almost immediately.  Anyone with a cursory knowledge of baseball will be able to understand what's going on pretty much right away.

That's not to say it's flawless. For one, while I appreciate that they made Dugout Heroes easy for everyone to play, I kind of miss the complexity of juggling lineups and injured players.  I suppose I have MLB The Show and MLB Power Pros for that sort of thing, but even still, I wish there was a little more meat.

Also, bugs will sometimes rear their ugly head.  It happened a little more at launch, but you'll still run into the occassional baserunning glitch or loading screen that never actually loads.  The umpires also aren't very consistent.  I understand a fuzzy strike zone.  That's part of baseball, and it doesn't bother me like it bothers other players.  However, there are times when you'll be absolutely sure you were "safe" and the umpire decides it was an out.  It's great when it goes your way, but it's not so great when it's against you.

There's one final thing that sticks in my craw.  One of the great things about baseball is working a pitcher for the right pitch, driving up his pitch count and forcing him to make a mistake.  In this game, there's a readily accessible and easily reusable item that refills a players fatigue meter, and it can be used for pitchers as well.  In other words, driving up a pitch count does absolutely nothing.  It's a little disheartening.

There's also a few things that haven't been implemented yet, like an exhibition mode that doesn't count toward your stats and alternate announcers (including a Japanese announcing team that inexplicably popped up during one of my games.). However, the thing I want the most is the ability to have alternate teams. If I screw the pooch with my first team (like I did), I want to be able to create a new team without having to make a new account. Can we put that in there? Pretty please? I'm asking as politely as possible.All that being said, MLB Dugout Heroes feels like baseball.  Plus, circling back to the best part about Dugout Heroes:  It's all free.  Sure, you can spend money to buy special items for your players, but you don't have to.  If this was a $50 product, I would be upset.  Since it's absolutely free to play, I have no qualms about recommending it. So, our long national nightmare is over.  We finally have a halfway decent baseball game on PC after a long drought.  I hope that Dugout Heroes continues being a success, and I hope that Games Campus can leverage the opportunities inherent in a ballpark (like ads) to continue making money and improving their product.

Can you start by firing those awful announcers?  Thanks.

Gaming Trend Score

77

1. Graphics: 65
2. Audio: 50
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 85
5. Value/Replay: 85
6. OVERALL:77