Customer Reviews

Little League World Series Baseball '08

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

My 5 year old grandson loves this game! He is mesmerized --- and that's a "good" thing !

It was too much fun watching the Little League World Series this year and playing it at the same time!

I love the original NES Little League baseball game. It may be my favorite baseball game of all time. So, when I heard the franchise was returning to current platforms (including the DS), I had high hopes of an even better game. Unfortunately, I was surprised to see a completely different game, with very little being improved.

I'll start with the pros...
* Batting and throwing using the stylus. This is a neat concept for a baseball game and I imagine is the norm for all DS baseball games.
* Home Run Derby. This minigame had a little potential.
* It held my attention long enough to complete the LLWS in the game (perhaps I was interested in finding out how bad the game was, I don't know).

And now, the many, many cons...
* You don't control the players when fielding, you only get to use your stylus to direct the ball to a certain base. This makes playing the field ridiculously boring.
* It's too easy to strike out batters.
* The fielding action is way too fast and not very realistic, even for a video game. For example, the ball is in the outfield in a millisecond, and then runner is moving to second base one millisecond later.
* Using the stylus to bat is challenging, but not in a good way. It only allows you to swing high, low or across the plate. It would be nice to see more variety of a swing.
* When you swing, the animation makes it seem like you didn't actually connect with the ball. Yet, the screen switches to your ball being hit to the fielders. Basically, when you swing and miss the ball or hit the ball, the ball, the animation is the same.
* No 10 run rule
* The game allows a run to count on the 3rd out of the inning (I don't think this rule has changed on any level of baseball).
* Your runners rarely automatically advance (like a flyball to the outfield when there are already two outs), you have to make them all advance with the stylus.
* You earn the ability to throw "the heat" way too often when pitching.
* Between every inning you receive a fielding, batting or base-running tip. There are 3 total tips. After the 3rd or 4th time, it's not really necessary to show me the same tip again.
* When the computer hits a home run, the camera doesn't even take you to the outfield -- it just displays "home run" text on the screen while your fielders look in the direction the ball was hit.
* After I won the US LLWS, I played one additional game. I didn't even know who I was playing. When I won this game, I won the entire LLWS. You'd think the game should've let me know that was the championship game.
* All other minigames are terrible. Bowling is the worst. Tic-tac-toe is almost as bad. Horse could've been fun, but wasn't.

I was disappointed that this game was so different from its namesake on NES, but I hope that the recently released LLWS Baseball '09 is a completely different game from LLWS '08.