Name: The Bigs
Genre: Sports
Platform: Xbox 360, PS3, PS2, Wii (Reviewed on Wii) 

Ever since Wii Sports had its cute little baseball game, Wii owners have been twiddling their thumbs waiting for a “real” baseball title to be released for their motion-sensitive Wiimote. It has been a long time since any sport that didn't rhyme with "soot-ball" was considered America's game. The popularity of the sport has been declining in line with the rise of football fans and, in turn, football games. The Bigs promised to change all of that by taking the one or two big plays in the average baseball game and stretching it out to fill a full nine innings.

If you get The Bigs and try to play without learning the controls first, you are looking for a disaster. Being the time hardened and veteran gamer I am, I decided to give it a go. I swung the remote around like a lasso and stared in shock as the opponents slowly slipped ahead of me by 15 points. Disgruntled, I played the tutorial level and finally was able to lose by less than 10 points. Several attempts (and fairly sore biceps...) later I found myself in a position to win the occasional game and started to have a blast.

Where the game thrives is in its over the top interpretation of the sport. Sure, it’s no Blernsball, but it takes its liberties with the rules in its own way.

Every time the game goes your way via taking a base, making a catch, or striking out a player, you gain points. After enough points your “Power Up Meter” reaches full and allows you to unleash a powerful hit. If the batter connects the ball explodes out of the field. It feels like a Mario move but game represents it differently, keeping it from being too goofy.

Fielders can perform ridiculous jumps and catches that you may only see once a season. Kicking off the wall and grabbing a ball that should have been out is something one player may do in a lifetime, but in The Bigs it is a common occurrence.

Just because the over the top action happens often it does not mean it loses its flavor. Every time I found myself watching the replays and wondering how the hell the fielder caught the ball or how the shortstop managed to jump as high as he did. It keeps the game fast paced and fixes the slow sport of Baseball into something swift and, well, worth playing.

 

The controls for The Bigs are amazing in some aspects and terrible in others. Batting is much like Wii Sports but more focused and fine-tuned. Pitching is also fairly fun and allows for a fair amount of different pitches to be thrown. Batting and pitching also take more advantage of the motion than the Wii Sports version did allowing for the speed of your movement to have much more of an influence. Now standing up and swinging the bat with all your might will lead to a bigger hit.

However, fielding is not nearly as intuitive. Throwing the ball, which was always handled with either a button corresponding with the direction or aiming in a direction and pressing a button, is handled with motion. Swinging down throws to home, up to 2nd, left to 3rd and right to 1st. This may SEEM easy but it is far from it. When you only have one second to decide the last thing you need is the game mistakenly thinking you swung down when you actually moved left. It is glitchy and just doesn’t work.

There are several modes to fool around with including a create-a-character mode (with barely any customization other than the outfit) and a home run derby (which doesn’t really improve your skills in hitting and is little more than a cute mini-game) but none of them hold too much interest. The game is an arcade game more than a baseball game. This is not a bad thing, just something we need to get used to with the Wii. But hell, I am not going to complain.