High Heat 2004 (Xbox) - Playing in 2009 on Xbox 360. - JohnDoe8865's Blog

JohnDoe8865's Blog

High Heat 2004 (Xbox) - Playing in 2009 on Xbox 360.

Posted on January 21, 2009 at 01:19 AM.

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Wow, so I fired up High Heat 2004 for XBox on my 360 tonight for a trip around the diamond and to see how the game has held up over the years. Well, I've gotta say - it was the most fun I've had playing a game of baseball in over 2 years. Between nitpicking 2K7 and 2K8, I had forgotten what I loved about baseball games. I found it again in HH 2004. It's hard to put your finger on.

The sound is a mixed bag on the XBox version of HH 2004. On one hand you've got some good commentary, but a lot of repetitive lines, some horrible canned sounds for crowd stomps and chants, and some "good for their time" bat, ball, and glove sounds. The enthusiastic umpire calls are a nice touch, and the crowd boos repeated pickoff attempts too. An example : Tom Glavine attempted to pick my baserunner off 3 times in a row (wow) and the home Cincinnati crowd let him have it! It was a nice touch.

The graphics, while not having face or head scans were good enough to not draw me out of the game world. I was the most worried on how HH's graphics would hold up, but they did, and reasonably well I'd say, in HD. I remember playing on an SD TV and playing far worse looking games, so I try to look back on HH 2004 with some perspective. You simply cannot compare it to any game that has been made on XBox 360 or PS3. It's not even close, obviously.

The field detail isn't very good as far as having correct seating charts, flat crowds, bland scoreboards and wall graphics, and some choppy animations on fielding. The diamond itself though held up pretty well through a couple of play-throughs. It was raining in one game, and while not beautiful, it was satisfactory to me. Now we all know High Heat was never known for it's graphics, but all in all, I think that Heat has aged better than I expected.

I had forgotten some of the little things like the computer making defensive substitutions and pitching around players. Pitching around the 8 hitter when a man is on second and I have the pitcher on deck. The game has some truly remarkable AI even now. I also like how at the end of a game you get an uber-detailed newspaper style boxscore with everything from how many ABs a guy had, to how many strikes each pitcher threw and how many batters he faced. There is also a very detailed run down of each inning's action.

Now I know to some of the HH veterans, this is old news. I also know that the definitive experience of High Heat 2004 is on the PC with all of the mods and community support. But for me, finding the game used for $1.99 at Gamestop and being able to come home, put it on my big screen, pop the disc into my 360, and play a damn fun game of baseball is something that I hadn't done in a long time.

The game is fun and realistic. I think that's about all that any of us are looking for in a game. High Heat 2004 delivers on that.

I've also snagged used copies of All-Star Baseball 2003 ($.99) and All-Star Baseball 2005 ($2.99) a while back, two games which gave me many fond memories during my Xbox days and also kept me up at night tinkering with them. In the near future, I'll take each of those games through a few paces and see how well each game holds up respectively. So look for blogs on those games in the near future.