All-Star Baseball 2005

All-Star Baseball 2005 is a baseball video game developed by Acclaim Studios Austin and published by Acclaim Entertainment for PlayStation 2 and Xbox in 2004. The game features Derek Jeter on the cover.
Gameplay.
The game includes several features that most previous versions did not include, such as old players like Babe Ruth, Yogi Berra and others. Apart from each of the Major League Baseball (MLB) teams, the game also features teams made up with legends of different eras.
Players can play an exhibition game against the computer, or a 162-game season, choosing their favorite team. Users can also create their own players and set their playing talent to one of five levels: rookie, veteran, all-star, legend and hall-of-famer. The rookie level is recommended for beginners: when using the rookie level, hitting the ball becomes automatically easier (with a mechanism that the game calls "timing"). In addition, players can choose whether the fielding during a game will be done entirely by the player, by the computer, or as a combination, both by the player and the computer. The latter is called the "assist" fielding mode.
There are other modes of play. These are called the "Bonus play modes". The bonus play modes consist of a pick-up baseball bame, a "Baseball Weekly" trivia game, a trivia game, batting practice, and a home run contest. The pick-up game in particular features four different fields where the player can stage games, these being a schoolyard, a sandlot, a city park and a corn field. Major League players chosen by the computer "show up" for the pick-up games; the player has no control over who will show up. Typically, 16 contemporary players and two retired players (ex. Ty Cobb and Satchel Paige) show up for games. The player chooses the field and the number of innings that the pick-up games will be held for.
The trivia game offers an image of a board game, perhaps making "All Star Baseball 2005" the only video game not related to a board game that features a board game mode. In the trivia game, two players play against each other. The computer picks up cards from a "stack of cards" placed on the board, in a somewhat similar way to the cards and the board used in "Monopoly". Players must then correctly answer the question on each card. If the player is wrong, that represents one out. The player gets a "hit" for a correct answer, and the computer determines whether the hit was a single, double, triple or home run. Every time a player gets a "hit" by answering a question correctly, the computer places a chess figure on board, and the figure moves to the corresponding base, depending on what the computer determines. Before this game, players also choose what level of competition they want, and how many "innings" is the trivia game going to be played for.
Barry Bonds does not appear in "All Star Baseball 2005", because he is not a member of the Professional Baseball Players Association. Instead of him, the San Francisco Giants have a make-believe player named "Wes Mailman". "Mailman" actually announces himself on one of the billboards at the Philadelphia Phillies home games. The game does feature play by play commentary by Arizona Diamondbacks television broadcaster Thom Brennaman and former major league player Steve Lyons, who sometimes offers long answers to Brennaman's questions during games.
Reception.
The Xbox version received "generally favorable reviews", while the PS2 version received "average" reviews, according to the review aggregation website Metacritic.