Sega totally revamped the World Series Baseball series last year, and finally made it a respectable game. They improved basically every facet of the game, and it easily won the awards for best baseball game of the year. The franchise was amazing, the game played almost flawlessy, and the graphics blew everyone away. The game has improved since last year, so its downright scary how good it is now.

    The game plays better then any other baseball game I've ever played. There are several types of batting types, like cursor and timing based. With the cursor, you have to aim where you want your batter to swing. With timing, all you need to do is time when the pitch comes in. There are anine different pitches in the game, and each pitcher has most of his real life pitches. Eacdh batter has a strike zone which shows his hot and cold spots. This adds alot of strategy to the game, since you have to decide when to take the risk to throw the ball in the hot zones, and when to play it conservative. Its easy to field the ball, and Sega has added in some new moves, like umping at the fence to steal home run balls. All this put together makes it the best playing baseball game I've ever had the pleasure to play.

    Now that we are done talking about the on-field action, now comes the best part of the entire game: The franchise mode. Qute simply put, this is the best franchise mode for any console sports game ever. You can do almost everything that a real team can do, from signing foreign players to hiring coaches, to even seeing who's in the hall of fame! You start out by picking any team you want, and then you have a draft where you need to select coaches and hire them. Once that is done, you can rearrange your rosters, do trades, and some other stuff, then your ready to start the season. After every game, you'll see a box score for your game, then you can check out the scores for all the other games in the league, along with important news on the news wire. Every so often your coaches will tell you their opinion on something you should do, like trade a high priced player or sign a foreign player that the scout has found.

    Once the season is over, you can go into the offseason. First thing you do is resign any players that are done with their contracts if you want them, and let go players you don't want. Once this is done, you'll see a full list of all the players who went into free agency or retired. Sometimes I've even seen players who go to Japan! Next thing you do is a five round amateur draft. Your scouts give you lots of info on each player, like their hometown, school, ratings, etc. They even give you a paragraph on each player. Each player starts at a real low rating, so you'll need to build up their ratings by keeping them in the minors. Once you complete the draft, you can go into free agency, which is a 10 day period. You can offer players contracts, and hope that they sign with you. Don't offer them too low of a deal, or they might refuse to talk to you again. After you are done all this, then you can start a new season, and there isn't any limit on the amount of seasons you can play.

    The graphics are beautiful in the game, except for one little problem. Most of the players look nothing like their real-life counterparts, except for only the most well known players. Its kind of disappointing to see this, since most of the other games on the market have all the players real faces. Other then that, no other baseball game has ever looked as good as this game. The stadiums are incredibly detailed, the players look great, and they animate even better. The game runs at a consistent 60 FPS, and never slows down. Once of the coolest new features this year is a new camera angle which is the TV cam, which looks exactly like a real baseball game looks like. This really adds alot to it, since it gives a real sense of authenticity.

    The announcers in the game do their job well, and say alot of interesting things. They do repeat themselves sometimes, but not enough to annoy you. The sound effects are great, from the ball hitting the bat, to the fans reacting when their team goes on a rally. A cool feature thats not found in other baseball games are the specific player taunts. When a well known player comes up to bat, you'll hear fans say taunts that relate to the actual player. For example, when Derek Jeter comes up, one fan screams about all the models he dates. Its pretty funny hearing all the different comments made about the players.

    If you like baseball games, you'll be playing the franchise for a long time. Its just so much fun, its really tough to tear yourself away from it. The Big League Challenge, which is a home run derby tournament, will be a good multiplayer diversion for when you have buddies over. The one thing it does lack are the collectibles in games like All-Star Baseball 2004 that keep you playing.