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I used to buy two kinds of ice cream: Ben & Jerry’s or Haagen Dazs for me and the missus and some of that day-glo glop that costs about $1.99 a gallon for the kids because, really, what do they know? How refined could their developing palates really be? As it turns out, apparently a lot more than I presumed because once they tasted the good stuff they didn’t want the neon corn syrup and Cesium 137 blend anymore—given half an opportunity, they know the difference between quality and crap. In a world where no other videogames exist, Backyard Baseball 2007 might come off pretty well but here in reality it doesn’t. To quote my nine year old son, “This game is stupid.” Out of the mouths of babes…

Strike One!

Backyard Baseball 2007 would seem to offer kids a gentle introduction to America’s pastime: a few real-life major leaguers are kiddie-fied and sprinkled in amongst a bunch of made-up, cartoony kids then the whole game is run through an uninspired Whimsy Filter resulting in pitchers’ fatigue being represented by depleting juice boxes and some novelty pitches and hits (for example, the meteor pitch is literally a blazing fastball). The fields are similarly cutesyfied, set in backyards (of course), diner parking lots, and the like. There’s a little charm generated there but not much. The attempts at humor are incredibly weak—Miguel Tejada’s favorite bird is an oriole! Hoo boy, is that rich!—and there are so few of them that you’ll have endured them all in just a couple of games.

Strike Two!

You have to actually wonder if the designers of the game really get kids. Maybe they just have access to a special breed of child that is unnaturally patient, forgiving of obvious mistakes, and starved for entertainment. The young kids this game targets are exactly deep wells of patience yet the game features ridiculously long load times as well as pointlessly long and unskippable batter walk-up and pitcher wind-up animations (at least the game mercifully defaults to a three-inning contest). The in-game announcer routinely describes deep fly balls as being just “in the back of the infield” and can’t tell the difference between a bunt and a line drive. A third grader can. And a first-grader knows the difference between boys and girls which is something the announcer hasn’t mastered, instead referring to every player as “he,” even the ones named Angela. If you don’t think gender distinction matters to the playground set then you obviously haven’t kept your cootie shots up to date.

Strike Three!

All of this would be forgivable if the gameplay were enough to engage a kid but it’s not. There are about three thousand things wrong with the core play but since the Internet can only hold so many words before every computer in the world bursts into flames, let’s just focus on bunting as a case study in horrible wrongness. Bunting, in a word, sucks. When defending against the bunt, the game always defaults to the catcher as the person to field the ball, even if the pitcher or someone is closer. Okay, fine, whatever. Let’s make some sort of tortured peace with that and the fact that you can’t jump to another fielder and move on. Getting your catcher to the ball is a case study in anguish since that player is never shown onscreen during bunt plays so you have to just shove the left thumbstick up and hope to Yahweh that the little guy eventually wanders somewhere on screen so that you can drive him toward the ball. The catcher will be late, but it doesn’t really matter since no one—not the pitcher, not the first baseman, not anyone on or off the field—bothers to cover first base. It’s a guaranteed hit in a multiplayer game and led to six straight runs by my son before I told him to cut it out. I then bunted my way to seven unanswered runs. Of course, if you play against the CPU, the game will make the play the right way every time. It’s infuriating.

Yer Out!

And it just gets worse. The fielding controls are slow and unresponsive, the baserunning interface is a mess, you can’t check your swing, and—for a nice dose of creepy—the wispy-voiced but obviously adult announcer casually mentions that he’s got to run because his mom is coming to pick him up. I’m not saying John Mark Karr did the announcing, I’m just saying his image was in my mind every time this clown spoke after that.

But I’m not supposed to like it, I’m an adult, right? That’s why I played it with my son, a young fun-loving guy with pretty forgiving gaming standards who turned to me halfway through our third game and dolefully pleaded, “Dad, do we have to keep playing this?” Not if we’re smart, my boy, not if we’re smart.

Article by: Robert Coffey
Video produced by: Tim Jennings