Sega Genesis
Released by Accolade in 1993
Grade: D+
Hardball III is ambitious by Genesis standards and very frustrating to play. It uses a modern pitching system and aims for full-blown realism, but it comes up way, way short.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the third of three on Genesis, and the first two are known to be worse. An SNES version of III was released in 1994, and another edition was planned for Jaguar but didn’t come to fruition. The series was apparently popular on PCs back in the day.
There’s an interesting legal precedent involving the first Hardball game on Genesis. Accolade wasn’t authorized to release it and shrewdly reverse-engineered the console’s boot-protection, whatever that is, so Sega sued them. Accolade won the case and was free to release more terrible games on Genesis. Read about it in the Wikipedia article on the Accolade company.
Praises and gripes
For almost all 16-bit baseball games, you can bet on me complaining about the stupid pitching system that allows pitchers to control the ball mid-flight. Well, you’re spared this time, because Hardball III uses a more realistic system: choose a pitch type, aim, and then throw. Yay!
Unfortunately, the “aim” part of that sequence is finicky as hell. When do I hold the button, and for how long? Worse yet, the ball slowly stutters on its way to the plate. For batters, it’s especially hard to judge when it’s above or below the strike zone.
The batter also chooses his strategy before the pitch: contact or power swing, and if you have runners on, you can dial up a steal or a hit-and-run. It’s pretty nifty, but this repetitive process is slow moving between pitches.
The low-angle behind-the-batter and behind-the-pitcher viewpoints look nice, and the animations aren’t bad. But then the ball is struck and the game completely falls apart. The cameras are pulled WAY back and the graphics have no sense of depth. The itty-bitty players move unnaturally, as does the ball itself. You’re bound to make needless mistakes in the field and on the basepaths.
This horrible design choice is at least kind of interesting, though. The camera never moves. Instead, there are a few different static views of the field, and which one you see depends on where the ball goes. One time I grounded the ball to the pitcher, he picked it up, then the screen quickly faded to black and then reappeared from a different angle as he threw to first. What is this? A film noir movie? I wonder if this would have looked better on a 32-bit system, you know, like in Final Fantasy VII, where all the backgrounds are beautifully hand-painted, and your little 3D man walks around it.
Anyway, put it all together and this game is a mess. You’ve got a slow pace, ugly ball movement, agitating batting difficulty, slippery fielding control, and insanity-inducing camera angles. “Hard” is the operative word for Hardball III, as in hard to enjoy.