High Heat Major League Baseball 2004 Critic Reviews

The key to Hight Heat 2004, and the reason it already ranks high on the list of my all-time favorite games, is that it's the best bargain in games. A full 162-game season will last you about 90 hours.

Other baseball games might have a more unique feature or two, and several absolutely have better graphics, but only High Heat delivers such consistently riveting gameplay.

3DO made significant improvements to the graphics, Gameplay and menu presentation. Perhaps the biggest improvement was to the pitch types, especially the movement on the various types of fastballs.

Still the best baseball sim there is.

Not flashy, but it more than gets the job done -- the Jim Thome of baseball games.

If you compare HH to the rest of this year's baseball crop, there's no contest:... High Heat triumphs by focusing squarely on gameplay.

The game play is top notch and the graphics got a great upgrade.

Although it hardly branches out into an altogether new baseball experience, this game is a real blast to play.

Basically unchanged with a few recognizable additions and accuracies to a sport that only the passionate truly enjoys, this title's illustrious career isn't quite over.

A sequel that warrants an upgrade for owners of last year's game and a second look from prospective players who were turned off by the series' formerly unyielding adherence to a simulation design.

Playing this is the closest videogames have come to perfectly re-enacting the mind duel between pitcher and batter.

It's still the best game for hardcore simulation fans who don't care about visuals.

Unlike other companies that concentrate on visuals, High Heat puts its energies on the fundamentals that make a great baseball game.

The bar of excellence has been raised to a staggering new height, and High Heat doesn't even come close to touching it.

A solid baseball game that grows on you the more you play it, thanks to the great computer AI and the deceptively simple batter-pitcher interface... Yet the new graphics, sound, and menu navigation are still not up to the level the PS2 is capable of.

These improvements to the graphic engine come at a price. The frame rate slows down whenever multiple players are running the bases, and it experiences noticeable hiccups during the batting sequences.

The animations are far from being fluid, and the PS2 version of High Heat suffers from some severe slow downs during gameplay.