Baseball is America’s pastime, but baseball videogames are not quite as popular, mostly because they tend to be a bit tedious to play. Midway takes sports games and adds attitude to them. Like it has been doing with football and hockey, last year, the developer took a look at baseball, and successfully added Turbo meters and an on-fire mode to a game you wouldn’t expect them to work in. This year’s version of MLB SlugFest makes the sophomore improvements you’d expect in a sports franchise, and while there are still some kinks to work out, Midway brings a fun take on a sports game that is traditionally presented as a simulation.

Let’s go through the year-to-year checklist of updates and improvements to sports games: Updated rosters, better graphics, more commentary, and everything else you automatically get from a year’s development time. If you compare last year’s version to this year’s, you will see a noticeable difference, almost enough of one to get this version, even if you picked up 20-03.

If you don’t know what this game is about, you might be interested in it. It’s about baseball on the surface, of course, and everyone knows how to play the game. Midway, tweaked the rules a bit though. For starters, by default, games are only seven innings long. This helps curb long, boring games by taking out the long part. To remove the boring part, you can literally “punch out” base runners, jump 30 feet into the air to snag a line drive, bean batters in one of three convenient locations, and throw runners out at first base from left field.

Midway somehow turned the game into a contact sport, and by golly, it works beautifully. If you need to steal a base, you can deck the ball handler so that he drops the ball, and you can scoot 90 feet down the baseline while he’s reeling in pain. You can also clothesline the third baseman trying to tag you out, and you’ll take your base safely. This adds a twist of strategy to a game that really doesn’t require all that much.

Now that you know the gist of what SlugFest is about, let’s move on to the nitty-gritty facts of the game. Right from the get-go, you’ll see it’s a lovely looking game, no doubt about it. The players are all spitting images of their real-life counterparts when seen up close, and the baseball stadiums and respective fields look great. However, the two don’t seem to go together all that well, and while you’re playing, you’ll notice that the player seem a bit washed-out when seen at a distance. This really isn’t a problem, but when a game such as baseball is relatively easy to make look realistic, any little quirk will stand out. Still, the game looks great from top to bottom when giving it an overall look.

The gameplay is a great success. Shorter games and fast play make for a good baseball experience in a short amount of time, with a game taking around 20 minutes to complete. Batting and pitching cursors that slow down a game are nowhere to be seen, replaced instead with the requirement of good swing timing and location guessing (up, down, left, right, and center, and all combinations thereof). Pitchers have five pitches to work with in those locations, and batters can try a regular swing, power swing, or bunt to get it in play.

Each team has a turbo meter that is used for actions such as a turbo pitch/swing, flooring it around the base pads, or catching up to a ball hit into the gap. The meter refills every half-inning, but you can gain some back by pitching a strike, making an out on defense, or by reaching base on offense. Most of the time, you’re going to have plenty to get you to the next half of the inning, but for longer innings with plenty of base runners, you’re going to be turbo savvy.

Pitching and batting are really easy. However, once the ball is put in play, there are a few control quirks that you might need to deal with. When you’re on offense, running around, it’s a bit of a hassle trying to get your runners to advance when you want them to. If you don’t time it right, the runner you want to send to third from first base might stop at second, instead of making the turn. Also, when you have two men on base, it’s not quite as easy to control them individually as the manual says it is. Supposedly, you hit L to advance them all, or L+direction to advance one person to that next base, but for some reason it isn’t as fluid as it should be. This causes numerous problems when you could have advanced another base, but find that the dot that represents your runner isn’t moving.

Fielding can be unwieldy too. While you can jump over buildings in a single bound to catch a ball, you need to both time it right and jump in the proper direction. This is not easy to do, which makes those spectacular catches seem that even more spectacular. You’d better catch the ball if you plan to jump for it. In addition, there are some instances when you want to throw to one base, but a cutoff man will intercept the ball, even if he’s standing within ten feet of the destination. Sometimes you’ll also find that the ball winds up at a base you didn’t intend. It’s these spotty control problems that can lead to a bit of frustration, but they don’t happen often enough for it to hinder the game too much.

Also something of an issue is the game’s commentary, which makes up the bulk of the SlugFest’s audio. For the most part, it’s appropriate and flows rather nicely. There are many instances where announcer Tim Kitzrow and comic relief Jimmy Shorts are in a conversation, a ball or strike is called, then they continue where the conversation was interrupted by the pitch. On the plus side is that every single ball and strike pitched isn’t always noted audibly. This is a good thing, since hearing the words “strike” and “ball” (and all variations thereof) a hundred times a game can get really annoying.

The problem with the audio is a common one in sports games, and the repetitiveness of this one is a problem for two reasons. Naturally, the more you play the game, the more often you’re going to hear repeats of jokes, stories, and various commentaries. Midway did include an option for mixing in 2003’s commentary with the new block this year, and that does help some, but in a while, some of it will start sounding all too familiar. The second problem is inexcusable, and that’s when you hear two similar comments on the exact same play. It’s quite unnecessary for anyone to need to hear that a ball has been hit foul in two different ways on the same pitch. Similar annoyances pop up with double plays and pop-flys. A bug like this is bad for a game that’s good overall.

In the end, this is still a great take on the sport of baseball. Baseball fans that don’t like baseball videogames might be interested in this one, and videogame fans that don’t like baseball might find this an attractive title as well. There are still some problems with the game that could have been ironed out from the time between last year and this, so hopefully Midway can get everything right with SlugFest 20-05. It’s a great to play with a friend too, so if you have a baseball pal around, you can’t go wrong with owning this game.