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By Keith B (5th Apr 2008)

The Bigs is Major League Baseball on steroids. Not like MLB players, who are in fact, for the most part, on steroids, but in the sense that this is balls-out baseball, a beefed-up celebration of highlight-clip material and unfathomable athleticism. As a result, you’ll see a lot monster homeruns and catcher’s mitt-smouldering fastballs–the stuff dreams are ostensibly made of–and little of the jock-adjusting tedium typical of MLB. Generally, then, you’ll be dealing with that little-known aspect of baseball often termed entertainment: golden-glove plays and high-speed triples. Consequently, methamphetamine is added to steroids in this videogame developer’s pharmaceutical cocktail, giving both gamers everything they want from baseball and everything the US Congress wants out: entertainment, at any cost.

The gameplay is generally very good, a point only improved upon by the game’s Wii-specific control scheme. When at the plate, you’ll bat in a fairly mimetic way: pretend to saddle up to an imaginary homeplate somewhere in your living room, give a few cocky practice swings and some big league swagger, ready for the pitch, and swing through when it arrives. Admittedly the chosen scheme will take some getting used to, particularly the lag between your swing and your batter’s. This is easily corrected or at least compensated for, of course, but it’s always frustrating to swing for the fence and see a zombie-like Barry Bonds offer a semi-bunt. Pitching is decent, combining pitch selection, by button hammering and motion sensitivity; while throwing is more or less accurate. Fielding is somewhat dodgy, at least in terms of its rather abstracted base-selecting procedure, which requires you to throw not at a base, but always up, down, left, and right, regardless of where you are positioned on the field. Fielding the ball itself is easy enough: just stand there, stupid, as my little league coach used to say.

Maybe best of all is the extent to which Blue Castle, the game’s developer, went to rethink and narrativize the season. Like most sports games, The Bigs has an organic full-season mode in which teams win, lose, and change: some bottom-division clubs hit hot streaks, some of the formerly unbeatables just can’t get a win. The Bigs’ original contribution to this more or less standard model, though, is novel. In the Rookie Challenge, you can call up a minor leaguer, pitting him against his heroes while watching him rise to the challenge or flounder at the plate. Over the course of a season something like a narrative unfolds, with little or nothing to do with which teams are winning and which are losing. This is the story of the kid you gave a chance, and it gives the game a face. As he builds points in five different categories–from running to hitting–you move towards the World Series. Seasons themselves are something of an investment, lasting upwards of a dozen hours–a feat not inconsiderable, since most games last little more than a half-hour. The point, though, is that your investment--in not just your team but also your soon-to-be All Star rookie--doubles your motivation, offering more than just the average incentives to winning.

Unfortunately, the game lacks online play–something that might have helped to distinguish The Bigs from the dozens of other standardized baseball games. Multiplay is in effect here, though, so you needn’t pitch and swing by yourself, like a teary-eyed, milksop Charlie Brown. This tends to level the playing field, so that your errors tend also to be your competitors. Not really an advantage as much as a mutual disadvantage.

Visually the game is very particular: many of the big-league baseball parks are reproduced with exacting detail, the players personalized (from facial expressions to cocky at-plate swagger), the uniforms dead-on. But for a game obsessed with verisimilitude, The Bigs is surprisingly unrealistic. Again and again, the things which 2K Sports, the game’s publisher, pushes are the very things which make the game so implausible. The monster homeruns, the unclockable fastballs, the acrobatic catches–one would be lucky to see all of these things over the course of an entire season, let alone a single half-hour game. But this, of course, is a quibble. For all of the game’s realistic visual attributes, few if any in the hysterically stimulation-obsessed gaming community would tolerate four-hour games and leisurely pitching-coach walks to the mound. Simply put, the visuals are tight, crisp, and handsomely believable. Add to this the body-shop- style character personalization–tattoos, entrance music–and you end up with maybe not a unique but a well-diversified sports package.

The music, likewise, is very solid, though the more hip-hop minded might be advised to plug in their iPods. The standard fare here is a particular brand of mid-90s rock: Jane’s Addiction, Motorhead, and White Zombie. The game’s commentator, on the other hand, is an utter blowhard, given to repetition and needless interjections. In some sense, I suppose, this is the most realistic aspect of the game: there really is nothing so boring as baseball commentators explaining the southwesterly wind that sent that last hit foul, so that if not necessarily in letter as much as in spirit, The Bigs got something really right. As well, the crack of the ball on the bat is at times a little lame, using a sound just as likely cribbed from two coconuts colliding as a major league batting practice.

Maybe what makes The Bigs such a quizzical if indeed good game is its almost unflappable belief in the joy of baseball. Baseball, as if we actually need reminding, isn’t necessarily all that interesting at the level of actual play. There’s a lot of standing around, scratching, and spitting; a description of your average pro baseball diamond sounds less like a multi-billion dollar entertainment complex and more like a heavily unionized construction site in a socialized state. The things that pique my interest in a baseball game are admittedly collapsed into two- to five-minute highlight reels: no-hitters, grand slams, snagged line-drives, numbskull errors, and bottom-of-the-ninth pinch-hit homeruns. I’m probably not alone. But then there are people like my grandfather, who love baseball on an almost theoretical level. His catalogue of baseball-related interests would certainly resemble mine, but the differences would be conspicuous. For him, baseball is so much more than what happens on the field that is worth noting; baseball is the psychological games–the tightly pitched batter, the complicated signaling and pseudo-signaling, the batter who knows exactly when to step out of the box, the pitcher who knows when fake a pick-off. And it’s all of these things that The Bigs is missing. This is a game obsessed with the veneer of its own surface, a game that celebrates its rejection of the cerebral. The Bigs is to baseball what pornography is to sex: a propangadist celebration, a distorted harping on the exceptional, a rejection of its own mundane reality. If you want baseball, go to a game; if you want a highlight reel, get The Bigs.