PlayStation 1
Released in 1997 by Virgin Interactive
Grade: C+
Grand Slam is easily the most sophisticated, modern-style game in the PS1’s lousy lineup of baseball games. It’s well thought out, but not consistently well executed.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the one and only baseball game Virgin Interactive ever put out.
Praises and gripes
Modern gamers will find Grand Slam’s core elements familiar. On the pitcher’s mound, you choose a pitch type, choose a location, and use a circular two-press meter to determine power and accuracy. In the batter’s box, there are three options corresponding with three difficulty levels: the simple “just press swing” option, the “move a bat cursor and press swing” option, and a third where you move the cursor while charging up your power before releasing the button to swing.
With effective camera angles, nice-looking digitized sprites, and pitches that move more slowly than in real life, pitching and batting are both intuitive. The ball might look like a messy clump of pixels, but it’s delightfully easy to track.
The action in the field is less consistent. The 3D effects have obvious flaws, so what looks like a line drive might actually be a harmless grounder. The ball sure moves fast, but the runners don’t have the speed to match it, so they’ll advance only one base on plays where they should be able to advance two. On the bright side, you get some helpful AI assistance chasing toward the ball, and it’s fun to whip the thing around the diamond.
There are other, more detailed flaws. The lead-off and base-stealing system is frustrating to say the least. Batted balls tend to follow the same few paths into the field. Home runs are way too common. When pitching, bad timing on the meter always results in the ball going out of the strike zone, and the CPU opponent will lay off like clockwork.
The game has an MLBPA license, so you get all the players and all the stadiums, but no team names or logos. You won’t forget it because you have to look at a player card and hear the stadium announcer call out the batter’s name before every at-bat, slowing the pace.
I do like that the game has some personality, with funny items in the menus (what difficulty do you want, rookie, meat, or ace?), some oddball commentary, and players that have cute little gestures every now and then.
All in all, despite its limitations, this game is truer to real-life baseball than anything else on PS1. Does it make for a fun gaming experience generations later? Not really. The gameplay is too flawed to make up for the slow pace and dated graphics. But I applaud the effort. If you were a hardcore baseball fan in 1997, this was probably the best option you had.