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April 8, 2015
Every Major League Baseball team starts the season with the same record, but it doesn’t take long to know whether a team will be a contender or a cellar-dweller. With RBI Baseball 15, I knew a championship wasn’t in the cards after my second at-bat.
After David Murphy started my first exhibition as the New York Mets against the Boston Red Sox with a blistering single that almost reached The Green Monster, a sacrifice bunt by Michael Cuddyer led to a phantom out on first despite the fielder never tagging the runner or touching first. The rest of that game went without catastrophe, but that goof-up put an asterisk next to the result. Pretty much every subsequent has game mirrored that initial outing; while I’d go multiple innings at a time enjoying the decent (if shallow) arcade-style hardball, sooner or later a glitch or gross misrepresentation of the MLB experience would sour my attitude.
To its credit, the on-field experience in RBI 15 has improved dramatically. (Though given how deficient last year’s RBI Baseball 14 is in terms of gameplay options, that’s a fairly low bar to clear.) If you prefer a static ball-height indicator that shows where a ball will land over RBI’s default moving target that expands and contracts based on height, you now have an option. If you prefer mapping throws to each base to the corresponding face buttons on your controller instead of last year’s inaccurate option of pressing a spot on the d-pad to correspond with the base while pressing the throw button, you can do that. There’s a few more minor additions too, like the ability to choose between moving an individual baserunner or all players at once, and varying pitch speed by pressing up or down in conjunction with the throw, and the end result is a slightly more enjoyable day at the ballpark than last season.
But wait, there are more glitches to rain out your fun! I’ve discovered some sort of Bermuda Triangle on the pitcher’s mound where no AI opponent can pick up the ball (and I couldn’t move onto the next batter unless I took advantage of the glitch and had all baserunners score). There’s no manual button for diving to catch a ball, which can be frustrating when a ball runs millimeters from a fielder’s grasp. Errors only occur when fielding, never throwing or catching throws, which makes it weird when outfielders consistently nail pin-point throws to home base from anywhere but the warning track. Starting pitchers still tire too easily, rarely making it into the sixth inning, even when I was extremely conservative with fastballs and rarely went deep into counts.
Roster management is midway between the Mendoza Line and All-Star status. It’s improved over the miserable RBI Baseball 14’s missing stat tracking, but it’s still lacking. While I was able to get well into the first month of the New York Mets’ 2015 campaign by keeping my players atop the league leader lists, managing my bullpen to keep relievers fresh, and tweaking my lineup to maximize production from the best of my bench, its shortcomings soon became obvious. Without the ability to trade players or having to worry about injury (or even fatigue for non-pitchers), I wasn’t long before I grew tired of my simple 25-man squad. While there are hints in the UI that there will be roster updates (only the mobile version of RBI Baseball 14 had any last year), right now RBI Baseball 15 is still playing catch-up with games I played 20 years ago.
