Man, it’s almost like these guys are on steroids or something.
Playstation 2
Released in 2009 by 2K Sports
Grade: B-
This take on arcade baseball is souped up with some creative enhancements of the pitching-batting interface, and the over-the-top animations you’d expect are well done. Where The Bigs falters is in the basics.
Where it falls in the series
In the midst of yearly releases of their simulation baseball series, 2K Sports released two arcade-style titles, The Bigs in 2007 and The Bigs 2 in 2009, filling the arcade baseball void opened by Midway’s MLB Slugfest series, which went from 2003 to 2006. 2K stopped with baseball altogether after Major League Baseball 2K13.
Praises and gripes
The game works like this: Doing anything good puts a bit of HGH juice into your team’s HGH meter. Correction: It’s “turbo,” not HGH.
If you get a hit or strike out a batter, your turbo meter rises. In a clever wrinkle, you can also get some extra turbo if you throw strikes through a batter’s hot zone, a spot you’d usually try to avoid.
You can use a bit of turbo any time you want. It gives a batter or pitcher a significantly higher chance of success. You can also use it when running the bases or playing in the field.
If you build your meter all the way up, you can cash it in on a “big blast” at the plate, where the whole screen is tinted blue, the pitcher is forced to throw in the strike zone, and just making contact is a surefire home run.
All this turbo business adds a lot of strategy that’s pretty unique for a baseball game. You can be patient and save up for the big blast, but using the regular turbo in the right moments can help you put runs on the board, which would in turn gain you more turbo. I gotta give it 2K Sports for creativity.
The pitching-batting interface works like most modern baseball games: Pick a location and pitch type, and control a meter to deliver the pitch. Badly timed pitches (which I throw a lot because I struggle with the damn meter) result in a tip-off, where an icon tells the batter where the pitch will end up. If a pitcher is struggling, he can potentially lose one of his pitches altogether. There’s a lot going against the pitcher in this game, in case you didn’t notice. In the default 5-inning game, teams usually need to change pitchers a few times.
The game sorely spoils one key ingredient, however. The batting viewpoint just isn’t good. It’s pretty difficult to identify the movement and location of each pitch. It seems that some pitches behave more like their real-life counterparts than others. There’s no alternate cameras to choose from, and this game is short on options in general. It doesn’t seem fun to spend time trying to improve your ability to see the pitch coming at you.
The gameplay in the field and on the basepaths is solid. Controls are responsive and fast. It’s on a small field with runners who run extra fast and fielders who throw extra fast.
This all may sound like a fun time, but when you add everything up, playing the game feels less like baseball and more like an action game, like Gunstar Heroes or Twisted Metal or GoldenEye. It’s kind of cracked out on HGH, I mean turbo, I mean crack.
I always go back to NBA Jam as the best example of an arcade game that retains the simple charms of the sport. The game is over the top, yet it still feels great to dribble around a court and release a shot and watch it fall through the net. The same idea doesn’t quite hold true for The Bigs 2.
It’s definitely worth playing for baseball fans. It’s actually good enough that a casual sports gamer who casually enjoys baseball could probably have it as the go-to baseball game. (This is the most non-committal review ever. I like it, I don’t like it, I don’t even know.) But if you really like baseball, you’ll want to play The Show. If you don’t like baseball, you won’t want to play The Bigs 2.