The BIGS 2 (Xbox 360) Preview
Posted by Chris Lansdell on 06.29.2009
Hands-on: The arcade sim is back to bring you more over-the-top thrills, but will it deliver? Producer Ron Nelson and associate producer Damon Perdue gives us the lowdown on this summer's most explosive sports game.
The Bigs was one of the best-received new sports franchises in a long time. With it's fast-paced arcade feel, bright and colorful graphics and theatrical gameplay it appealed to non-sports gamers as much as it did baseball fans. After taking a year off, The Bigs 2 is due for release on July 7, with the demo available now on XBox Live. I had the chance to sit on in a conference call with producers Ron Nelson and Damon Perdue, as well as play the demo, and have a whole ton of information and insight to share with you.
Both Ron and Damon worked in QA for the first Bigs game and so are very familiar with the franchise. One theme that came up repeatedly during the call was that the first game defined the franchise and the second game wanted to push the boundaries even more without "breaking baseball" (on the arcade side) or making it inaccessible for non-sports gamers (on the sim side). First impressions from the demo are that they have succeeded on the arcade side. Much of the sim-style improvements were not available on the demo, so I'll reserve judgment on that until July 8th or so. According to the producers, almost no aspect of the game was left untweaked. Although they largely left key elements like the control system, there have been major changes to things like Home Run Pinball, mini-games and online play.
I don't know about that beard, but the bat is pretty sweet
If you're new to the franchise, the game is best described by Ron: "high-paced, energy arcade-style" which is "about the fun moments of baseball...it's over the top and arcade, but real baseball." The first iteration of the game was lacking a few things for the more sim-minded among us, notably a full roster and the ability to play a full season. The developers listened and this year there IS the ability to play a full 162-game season. According to the producers it was very important to them that, in adding this feature, they keep it accessible to the casual gamers. As a result there are no contract expires or rain-outs in the game. Ron said there were also no injuries, but the demo at least has "Wounded" status, which affects a player's stats (quite drastically in most cases) when they get hit with a line drive or collide at the plate in a particularly nasty fashion. I noticed this tended to happen when turbo was used , but I can't say for sure if that's the only time. Trades, however, are possible. Teams will reach a series of milestones throughout the season, with Legendary milestones being the pinnacle of achievement.
You have to time this one JUST right...
The word "Legendary" plays quite the role in The Bigs 2. In addition to the season mode milestones mentioned above, the diving catch system has been tweaked to add Legendary catches which give huge increases to the big play meter. Pitchers also have Legendary pitches which they cannot lose no matter how much they got tonked about the park. Created players can get their stats to these levels and pull off dazzling and occasionally ridiculous plays as a result.
Comencé en La Liga Mejicana con tu jugador del primer juego...oops, sorry. The start of career mode.
The Career mode has seen some changes. For one it is now called Become a Legend mode. There is actually a storyline (in a sports game, no less!), in that your created player is trying to recover from a career-threatening injury, starting in the Mexican leagues (yes, Mexican) and trying to make his way to the top of the Majors. This is basically an excuse to reset all your attributes to 1, but I think it's a nice twist. The choice of a team now matters more than ever, as each team has a play style that matches their real-life style. As such it's a good plan to select a team whose style matches your own. There are new challenges now, more specifically matched to the position of your created player (which, alas, still cannot include pitchers). Points earned from these challenges still go towards upgrading your skills, which can now go to level 6, the Legendary level. More on that in a moment. With the Steal Player challenges still in the game, it might sometimes be an idea whose skill set matches the set of your team instead of just the best player on the team. Why? That's another new feature of the game: power-ups. Certain players (and we were assure that every team has some) have bonuses that kick in in certain situations: Brad Lidge gives you a big play bonus when he's brought in for relief, David Ortiz hits No-Doubter home runs that can't be robbed with big catches, and Joe Mauer gives a +1 bonus to any pitcher. I really like this addition as it gives you an added level of strategy to a game that was sorely lacking it. Another nice addition to the career mode is boss battles. These will normally involve some legendary players and range from "win a game against a team with Dennis Eckersley as the closer" to "have better stats than the boss character at the end of the game". The are also a whole load of extra bats, tattoos, stances, swings, animations...your player will be more customizable than ever before.
Baseball meets Tron in The BIGS 2. Actually, it's Home Run Pinball in Vegas. Just don't tilt!
Home Run Pinball (HRP) was the surprise favorite of the first game, and it is back this year. Ron said he wasn't surprised by the success of the HRP mini-game because they knew it was a great concept, but they were surprised at how well it all came together. With that popularity in mind they have expanded the game and improved on it. They have added new arenas (Tokyo, retro Times Square and Las Vegas), introduced a co-op mode (both on- and offline) and added more combos and hidden targets. The physics remain essentially the same. One thing I noticed is that when you connect with the ball, a message will appear on the screen if there are no more targets in the direction you chose. This is a minor change but one that can fix a whole ton of frustration. Unfortunately, the commentator tells you how many points you scored on each shot, in addition to it coming up on the screen. This gets old fast. The other mini-games are still there but have seen some tweaks. The Speed mini-game, for example, involves some Mirror's Edge-style running across the rooftops outside Wrigley Field. No word on whether falling into the ivy is possible.
The announcer is Damon Bruce again. He was good in the first game and promises to be even better in the second, with a ton of new lines recorded. Some are very cheesy (as you would expect) while others are actually funny. The soundtrack for the first game was good and this one should be no different, with Disturbed, Korn, Pantera and (ugh...) Daughtry all there.
Aside from the legendary moves and season mode mentioned earlier, Ron and Damon felt like the wheelhouse feature is one of the key improvements they've made. Each batter has a "wheelhouse", which is baseball speak for "place you really don't want to throw it because they will hit it very hard". Pitches thrown into this section of the strike zone have a higher chance of getting tattooed, but if you manage to fire one past you get a bigger turbo bonus AND shrink the wheelhouse for future pitches! This is another example of a way the team have added a layer to the game that doesn't change the fundamentals of it.
All the changes I've seen and sampled in the demo really speak to what the producers felt was the biggest improvement: gameplay. The BIGS was a blast to play but had some flaws. The BIGS 2 has taken those flaws and fixed them, slapped on a few layers of sparkly bits, and brought you a nice new package. The production team seem to have taken a lot of the feedback they received to heart, and have implemented some of the changes that fans had been asking for. The choice of Prince Fielder as the cover athlete was the perfect one: according to Ron Nelson, "...he's a big guy, he plays big...an exciting up-and-coming guy who plays with attitude". That suits this franchise to a tee. It's baseball cranked up to 12, and all signs point to it being the most exciting baseball game on the market.
