Xbox
Released in 2003 by Microsoft Game Studios
Grade: D-
This game has overly simple baseball logic and horribly clunky action.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the one and only.
Gripes
The pitching system is curiously basic. You can throw to nine specific sections of the strike zone, or to specific sections outside the strike zone. There are even different buttons for throwing a ball and strike. There’s no timing mechanism for accuracy or power. Every fastball is the same as every other fastball, every curveball the same as every other curveball.
As you might guess, this makes hitting as easy as you’ll find in a modern baseball game. There aren’t pitches that are so close to the corner you’re not sure if it’s a ball or strike. It either is or isn’t.
This reduces Inside Pitch to an arcade game before the bat even touches the ball. But, oh, it gets uglier.
The action in the field is atrocious, with mechanical animations, dumb AI, and a messed up balance between the speed of players and the ball. It’s amateur hour out there.
In its time, the only novelty of this game was that you could play it online, before that was standard for an Xbox sports game. That novelty is obviously useless to you now, so you can safely skip this one.