Released in the late eighties by Electronic Arts, Earl Weaver Baseball is a baseball simulation game with excellent, well-developed AI and great attention to detail. Earl Weaver Baseball, along with EA’s other eighties title, Madden Football, can be jointly credited with putting the now wildly popular EA Sports on the map. The game received its title because all of the managerial AI was created from a series of interviews between the programmers and Earl Weaver of the Baltimore Orioles.
EWB became a pioneer for baseball simulations and introduced many features that are common in baseball simulations today. The ability to replicate an entire season of play instead of an isolated game (and not show each individual play of every game) was born with EWB. Players can also choose managerial mode, which is simply a hands on management of a team; or arcade mode, which allows the user to physically control one of the players. Stadiums were depicted with accurate dimensions in the graphics as opposed to the same icon for each famous site. It was the first game licensed by Major League Baseball and used real players and statistics. It also was the first game ever to show a manager arguing with an umpire over a questionable call.
In arcade mode, the player could control where a fielder threw the ball, he can control pitchers and batters. Still, the beauty of the game lies within the micro managerial aspects of the game, featuring manual trades, statistics editors, and so forth. With such a great variety of teams and rosters available due to the licensing, it is possible for users to pit classic teams against current teams, or a user’s custom teams…just to see how they would fare. The multitude of options this creates lends great replayability to the game, since the user does not ever have to play the same game twice.
Of course, next to modern graphic displays, Earl Weaver Baseball is grainy, pixilated and highly inadequate. But the game play still features AI that is based on an actual human mind, and a successful professional at that. For this reason, it is difficult to dismiss the game based on its rudimentary graphics. Anytime a game can create two levels of fun, it is a must-have. Building the power team is going to appeal to the managers of the world, and pitting them against others will attract the sports enthusiast and action gamer. In short, this game has a little something for everyone, and a gamer really can’t go wrong by downloading it.
Written by:
~dorento1
