ESPN Baseball Tonight: Обзор и критика игры

the television program

ESPN Baseball Tonight is a baseball video game for the MS DOS, Sega CD, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo Entertainment System.

The game was licensed by MLB, but not by the Players Association, so while actual team names and logos are used, no player names are in the game. The lead programmers for the project were Alexander Ehrath and Russel Shanks. The game's simulation engine was written from scratch by the two lead programmers. The game featured video clips of Chris Berman and play by play audio from Dan Patrick. Little Caesars Enterprises, Inc. got involved with the development of the game, seeing marketing synergy between baseball fans and pizza eaters. A large promotion was rolled out by the pizza chain to coincide with the game's launch, including point of purchase material at 4,500 stores; a mail in offer for an ESPN "Best of Sports" videotape; and print advertising. The director of marketing for Sony called what Little Caesars received "a new method to reach families and men, 18 34, in a nontraditional, nonintrusive way." In Entertainment Weekly magazine, columnist Bob Strauss said that the design of the PC version was "appealing enough", but that it plunked players down into "shoddiest baseball simulation" he'd seen, with "pixelated generic looking players; awkward, superfluous voice commentary; digitalized computer generated and chroma keyed or CSO technology wise videos and a static interface that makes live baseball seem like the invasion of Normandy." He strongly preferred HardBall! '95 instead. Other reviews complained of its size. It weighed in at 54 MB on the PC (a very large file for early 1995 – 23 MB of it comprised the video clips of Berman). The Library Journal review simply said, "We strongly recommend a new storage algorithm for this one!"