Questions For Any Older PC Baseball Games?

[Yankee4Life]

We've been talking the last few days about the High Heat baseball game (s) and along with the mods uploaded by Playball there has been a lot of renewed interest in these games. Now I won't try and pretend that I know all there is to know about High Heat. All I can say is that I have High Heat 2002, '03 and '04 and I was around when they came out and were played regularly. Personally I liked all three games and I still have them installed on my XP laptop where they still get a lot of use.

 

So I made this thread to help answer some questions about High Heat baseball for those of you who are getting back into it or for those of you who want to try it for the first time. These games are very cheap to buy and are on Amazon.

 

Question What is the difference or differences between High Heat 2002 and 2003?

 

Answer Personally you are not going to find a lot of changes. One I remember is a complaint about the '02 version. On the old High Heat board some people swore up and down that there was a "comeback code." When you'd get a big lead the CPU would always come back and it didn't seem to matter what you did.

 

2002 was also modded a lot more because some of the people that bought 2003 were a little upset because it did not seem to be much of an upgrade except for the roster changes. To this day I still believe that the lack of changes from 2002 to 2003 helped pave the way for 3DO to go bankrupt because when High Heat 2004 came out they made some extreme changes in the game.  The whole look of the game was different. Player models were conclusively different from the previous two years. That was a big change but one you could get used to over time. The one change that everyone universally agreed on was the total lack of mouse support in the game. Users raised such a fuss when this happened that there was no way that 3DO could explain it away and (personal opinion again here) they ended up realizing that they made a huge error here. Sales were down for this game and that was the last game these guys made for baseball.

 

How about Triple Play baseball?

 

Answer I owned this series too. You guys got to understand this. During those years we had both High Heat and Triple Play coming out every spring with their game. For me it wasn't even a matter of choice. I bought them both and played the hell out of them. Both of them were baseball games but they were so different. High Heat had the strategy and everything that went along with that. Triple Play was less of that and more of an arcade game. I dislike describing it like that because I don't want to sound like I am putting Triple Play down. I'm not. I loved playing it.

 

It has been brought up before and it is worth mentioning again but our very own Kccitystar had his very own website for Triple Play baseball. And there were two TP sites on the net many years ago. He can tell you so much more about the Triple Play series than I can ever hope to.

 

Any other games?

 

Answer Well, yes. Before High Heat and Triple Play there was Hardball by Accolade and Tony Larussa by SSI. I bought these two and I can still play them via DOSBOX on my computer. Here is what I have:

 

Hardball 3. Al Michaels is the announcer. Very dated game. The announcing is choppy and the graphics were not good even when it came out. No mods for it.

 

Hardball 4. Improved game from the previous version. No mods for it.

 

Hardball 5. Probably the best one of the lot. Some oldtime teams like the '27 Yankees and '29 Athletics to choose from. No mods for it.

 

Tony 2. A game ahead of it's time. This game had a save feature but Mvp '05 did not. Season mods available for this.

 

Tony 3. Another example of a company trying to do too much from one version to the next. Good game but I was a Tony 2 fan and still am. Season mods available for this.

 

Oldtime Baseball. Built on the same engine as Tony 3 this mod which was released on DOS had every year 1871 to 1981, 12,000 players in all. So if you want to play with the 1924 Dodgers vs the 1924 Giants, this game was for you. My question is why can't this same idea be done today?

 

I have all these games. The question is can I post them?

 

Any more questions I will try to answer them or someone else could too.

[tinpanalley]

50 minutes ago, Yankee4Life said:

I have all these games. The question is can I post them?

I imagine this discussion isn't allowed so I'll keep it brief and as superficial as possible. Legally? No. "Abandonware" is a term that gets thrown around by people who want it to mean, "it's old enough, right?". Usually the answer is, no. Everything is owned by SOMEone in the gaming world except for extremely openly public domain games from the Win95 era that would come on bundled discs or found on BBS boards. And even then there is ownership, but there is no claim to development or support anymore so those guys just don't care. I would just hate for someone somewhere to start shutting down any site that even links to those games and for all of us to lose a community because of that. Not saying you would do that, please understand me, I'm simply repeating things I've asked my friends who are lawyers in IP and entertainment media and from what I know as an independent filmmaker securing music rights for my projects. The reality is, none of the old developers, even the big ones like Accolade and SSI
Should people want to find these older games online, they are out there. You won't get links from me.
 

[Yankee4Life]

I understand exactly what you mean. I have no plans on stepping on anyone's toes concerning the availability of these games.

[sabugo]

I have always figured - more like hoped - that companies would eventually release their code to the public once it became 'obsolete'. I eventually realised that this is something they will of course never do.

I can only wonder what the modders on this website would be capable of doing if they had even more access to the game code than they already have.
 

[Kccitystar]

Triple Play will always have a place in my heart, so will the BWOOOSH sound when you made good contact

[tinpanalley]

3 minutes ago, Kccitystar said:

Triple Play will always have a place in my heart, so will the BWOOOSH sound when you made good contact

Man, you just gave me a massive flashback with that "bwooosh". Went to look up Youtube clips. Just an all around great game. I'm certain that was the game I did adboards for for the SkyDome at the time.

[LouisvilleLipp]

Great writeup and idea Y4L, creating a forum for older baseball game discussion. 

[Yankee4Life]

4 hours ago, LouisvilleLipp said:

Great writeup and idea Y4L, creating a forum for older baseball game discussion. 

 

Thanks man. How far back do you go with baseball video games? I started with Hardball and Tony 2.

[tinpanalley]

1 hour ago, Yankee4Life said:

 

Thanks man. How far back do you go with baseball video games? I started with Hardball and Tony 2.

That's another interesting topic as well. Sorry, gonna pipe in on that...
First one ever was Sporting News Baseball (MS-DOS). Hours, days, years of fun with that. No stat tracking so my brother and I kept our own in a notebook. It was the PC person's version of RBI but with a database of classic players as well as current MLB players. The next was probably RBI. Never liked Baseball Stars which makes everyone my age go, "WHAT?!?! How could you NOT like Baseball Stars?!" Even back then I was saying, "...why can't the players names be longer than 8 characters?". A hacker/modder in training.

[Yankee4Life]

I did not have that game but I heard good things about it

 

Funny you should mention it but I have Baseball Stars and Baseball Stars 2 on ROMS. Many, many years ago there was a website called emux.com that hosted ROMS for all systems and I got the Neo Geo emulator and had a blast with them.

 

Emulators, ROMS, we are talking about an entirely different subject here, but this is what I was into about twenty years ago.

 

I don't know if you or anyone else heard of the Neo Geo system. It came out in the early 90's and you had to be very rich or very spoiled to have one. The console itself sold for around $600. Screw that, right? That's what I said too. The games were around $200. That's $200 apiece. Screw that too. I didn't know anyone that owned one and when the emulation scene was hot and there were many sites and FTP areas to go to I finally tried them out.

 

Was it worth all that money to buy one? Hell no. Graphics were nice but I wanted better gameplay.

[tinpanalley]

3 hours ago, Yankee4Life said:

I don't know if you or anyone else heard of the Neo Geo system. It came out in the early 90's and you had to be very rich or very spoiled to have one.

Yeah, just like the TurboGrafx-16. Ridiculously expensive but World Class Baseball was great and looked fantastic at the time even for a 16-bit system. The thing with NeoGeo was that it was what was used in a lot of arcade machines so it looked better than any of the other consoles and better than most PC games. What set the NEoGeo apart was that it had a 24 bit GPU and a Yamaha sound chip that made it sound better than anything else. But neither was worth what they sold for outside Japan.

[Kccitystar]

On 3/17/2018 at 12:46 PM, Yankee4Life said:

 

Thanks man. How far back do you go with baseball video games? I started with Hardball and Tony 2.

 

Ken Griffey Jr's Winning Run on the SNES.

[Yankee4Life]

13 minutes ago, Kccitystar said:

 

Ken Griffey Jr's Winning Run on the SNES.

 

I bet you couldn't have been ten years old when that came out. I didn't own that but someone I knew did and we played many games on it.

[Kccitystar]

1 hour ago, Yankee4Life said:

 

I bet you couldn't have been ten years old when that came out. I didn't own that but someone I knew did and we played many games on it.

 

Ha, I'm 30 now, but little old 9 year old me was PUMPED, with the fictional names and everything.

It was so much fun, until Major League Baseball ft. Ken Griffey Jr. on the N64 changed my life

[Yankee4Life]

All of a sudden I feel so much older.

 

[LouisvilleLipp]

On 3/17/2018 at 12:46 PM, Yankee4Life said:

 

Thanks man. How far back do you go with baseball video games? I started with Hardball and Tony 2.

 

 

Yeah, I had the Hardball series, Tony LaRussa, all the High Heat's , Triple Plays, and even ESPN had a MLB baseball and NFL game if I remember, in the mid 2000's.  I still have a few of them buried somewhere in my basement LOL.

[tinpanalley]

What is the issue exactly, graphically with HH2002 and "robotic movements" I've read about and what does the fix do that supposedly exists to repairs that?

[JoeRudi26]

If I remember correctly (and it's been ages ago), some of the modders were putting out animation files to try and smooth things out a bit. Some of the fixes seemed to work very well. Again, it's been a long time ago, so I may be confusing HH2002 with HH2001. 

[tinpanalley]

Not sure if this should go here or in its own thread because it's rather specific so feel free to move it if needs be.
Questions about HH2003...
1. What is "Attract Mode"? It's in preferences.

2. In any of the High Heat games on PC, how exactly do you guess at a pitch? The manual says you pull the left trigger then select, but I get no confirmation of anything. Then on top of that, the screen only displays keyboard commands for the pitcher on the CPU team. So there's no way to know what button for what pitch you want to guess. Does that make sense? And how do you guess location rather than pitch type? Can someone help me out? I'm lost.

[Yankee4Life]

1 hour ago, tinpanalley said:

Not sure if this should go here or in its own thread because it's rather specific so feel free to move it if needs be.
Questions about HH2003...
1. What is "Attract Mode"? It's in preferences.

2. In any of the High Heat games on PC, how exactly do you guess at a pitch? The manual says you pull the left trigger then select, but I get no confirmation of anything. Then on top of that, the screen only displays keyboard commands for the pitcher on the CPU team. So there's no way to know what button for what pitch you want to guess. Does that make sense? And how do you guess location rather than pitch type? Can someone help me out? I'm lost.

 

1. Attract mode, according to the manual is this. Toggle demo mode on and off. If you turn it on you can set the length of inactivity after which attract mode activates.

 

2. Guess pitch, also according to the manual:  Press the B button or [NumPadDel] + a direction to enter the pitch you think the pitch is coming next. If you don't know what pitches a pitcher has, press F1 or the Y button to display the pitching key. This shows this pitcher's pitches highlighted in white,  and their corresponding direction arrow in yellow. For example, to guess a change-up, press B or [NumPadDel] plus D pad UP arrow key. If you select a pitch this pitcher doesn't have, your selection is ignored.

 

Once the pitcher makes his selection and begins his pitch, you can no longer display the pitching key or guess pitch.

[tinpanalley]

35 minutes ago, Yankee4Life said:

 

1. Attract mode...

2. Guess pitch...

Fantastic, thanks man. I was looking at my HH2004 manual and that wasn't helping.  That at least gives me something to work with. I do keep hearing this sound of a bat hitting the ground. Maybe that's the activation sound that you've selected a pitch?

[Yankee4Life]

8 minutes ago, tinpanalley said:

Fantastic, thanks man. I was looking at my HH2004 manual and that wasn't helping.  That at least gives me something to work with. I do keep hearing this sound of a bat hitting the ground. Maybe that's the activation sound that you've selected a pitch?

 

Could be. I don't guess pitch a lot because I don't get a lot of them right.

 

[tinpanalley]

This question probably applies to all the High Heat Series. Has anyone ever figured out how to move Houston to the American League or is that just something people live with? I want to play a season of HH2004 and it would be cool if this could be done with a tool. I imagine it's tough because it means rewriting how the game keeps track of the season, schedules, etc etc etc.

[Yankee4Life]

My guess would be no. Back then the Astros were a National League team (as they should be today) and something like this wasn't even considered. A tool like this wasn't thought of.

[tinpanalley]

1 hour ago, Yankee4Life said:

My guess would be no. Back then the Astros were a National League team (as they should be today) and something like this wasn't even considered. A tool like this wasn't thought of.

Oh sure, but if I understand correctly, tools and mods (though few) did come after as well, so I thought maybe somebody had developed a way to do this. In the PC NHL Series, modders have ways of moving things around all over the place in those games and it's usually because the games are actually quite easy to modify and toy with. So, just thought by now, with the love for the game, someone would have figured that out. That's all. No big deal. Not gonna stop me from playing a season with 2004.

And in most cases, would you say High Heat's Classic rosters can be used in a Season mode to have a fun league with teams from history?