HardBall!

The Good
While visually the weakest of the Hardball ports, is there a better Atari 800 baseball game? Some bits of music mixed with great playability.

The Bad
Close to C64 version but not as strong visually.

The Bottom Line
A well designed, fun baseball game.

The Good
Tries to simulate a baseball game. Lots of neat features including pitch types, pitching locations, batting averages, field shifts, etc.

The Bad
Pretty much all of those features mentioned don't work! The game is totally unbalanced, with the "AI" cheating. The computer never swings at corner pitches and they are always a ball, making them worthless. If you throw down the center zone the computer almost always gets a hit and many times a homer, making that zone worthless. You now have 4 out of 9 zones to work with. These zones are 50/50 ball/strike or 50/50 hit/out. Players with over a .250 average bat about .900 in the game. The shift feature is broken and leaves a dead spot that no outfielder can get to and of course the computer ALWAYS hits it to that dead spot... game over. I could go on... and on about what didn't work.

The Bottom Line
As the title states, this is the worst, most frustrating game I have EVER played (and I've played a lot!). I spent weeks trying different strategies and players and options and always gave up after 6 or 7 innings with the score in the range of 29-7 computer. I thought maybe it was me so I had a friend try, he had the same results. Hardball was so bad I put the 5 1/4" floppy disk in a blender and mailed the remains back to Accolade!