SNES Game Review: Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball

 Game shows, board games and movies weren't the only ones involved in the video game craze that was the 1990's.  Professional athletes donned their names on a lot of video games.  Joe Montana, Sterling Sharpe, Wayne Gretzky, Brett Hull, and Frank Thomas are among the many, many athletes to be a part of video games in the 1990's.  For Frank Thomas, his game was Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball.  Big Hurt was his nickname as he crushed baseballs for home runs in the 90's and became an icon overall.  This game was made by Akklaim and Iguana Entertainment and had Stats Inc, so there was some major firepower of this game in the day.  What does the game do well? Not do well? All that and more below.

Positives:

1. Motion capture: This is one of the first games to capture motions, more brought to light with EA Sports in 1998 with Madden and other games.  This was a good step in the right direction and really captured, excuse the pun, what the future of video games would be overall.  So you could say this game was ahead of its time.

2. Graphics: I mean it is a good graphic game, and the players look like players and you have the feel of being in a ballpark, but more on this below.

3. MLB and MLBPA license: In a decade that before the PS1 you didn't know if a game would or would not have a sports and players association license, it was a welcome relief that this game has a good set of both licenses with this game overall.

Negatives:

1. Batter/pitcher interfaces: Both are incredibly slow.  The hitting motion is just slow and takes forever for a swing to be done rather than naturally.  The pitcher just pitching the ball takes a while after selecting the pitch so it really drags the game overall. 

2. Slow pace: I'm not a fan of just slow paced games unless they are RPG's.  Sports games shouldn't be slow paced and this game just fails in going a good pace.

3. Unnecessary things: I don't understand why there is a rain delay in the middle of the game, the extra motions of fielders, pitchers, hitters and so forth.  It just feels extra and slows the game down to a point that it just becomes unnecessary.

4. Not an accurate ballpark representation: Yes the graphics are good but the ballparks are so generic of domes and open air stadiums that it just misses the mark entirely and I am not sure how they decided it was a good accord there.

Overall Rating/Rank

To be fair, Frank Thomas Big Hurt Baseball is a game I can't really recommend.  Reason is too many unrealistic and slow things to the game to make this worse rather than better.  It was a nostalgia game since Frank Thomas was one of my favorite players but I felt they could have done a lot better than they did and the finished product just wasn't very good.  4 out of 10 is the rating, but an overall rank that of 490th is reasonable.