Thursday, April 28, 2011

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers

Sports games. Not my forte. But it is my 185th completed game. On with the analysis.

Game speed completion: I'll have to take everyone else's word that it took them 5-8 hours. It took me 12-15. It probably is easier than I made it out to be. I had chosen to avoid the story mode and artificially made the game completion longer. The game has a story mode worth 320 points when completed. If a player decides to play the story mode first, all other supplemental achievements could have potentially been unlocked throughout the duration of the story mode, reducing any achievement cleanup for full game completion.

GSL Potential: The GSL potential is high for this game. The game has already been recognized as a quick 1000 point retail game. Because it is such a high visibility game, what particpants will be looking for is if other competitors have this game on thier game lists to predict fast point potential. Because there is no game save capabilities, there is no way to stack points in this game.

What the guides don't tell you: Play the story mode first. Then clean up whatever achievements you did not unlock after the story is completed with the unlocked teams. The provided guide and roadmap in x360a will successfully walk the player through the story mode in the most efficient way. Expect the game to start difficult but get progressively easier as you add team captains to your own teams you beat them.

The guides tell the player to use directional up and the A button to hit the ball. Rather than that, use B instead for consistently better results.

What I found is that games go faster for me was if I could simply build the 10 point gap within the first or second inning. This was done after the second win and gaining two five star batters. If the game did drag into a third inning, I would quit and retry. But for story mode, the game was set to nine innings because you will need the extra innings to meet mercy rule requirements with the weaker team.

4 comments:

  1. I know what you're saying, and I agree that it's always easier to get points in games that don't make you want to smash stuff (See Peace and CSI). But here's the thing. I share your hatred of most sports games, but I think that often works to my advantage. When a GSL comes around I have plenty of sports points available...and they're usually easy. I don't even go for the low hanging fruit in the sports genre, so when crunch time hits that seems to be the best source of quick and dirty points.

    This past month as I was looking for games I realized I hadn't even touched Madden 10 yet, and I still had over 200 points in unfinished achievements in March Madness 07 for crying out loud. Don't get me wrong, I still had to force it and I couldn't have handled more than a couple sports games in the entire month, but I think it gave me an advantage over all those people who play Madden for fun as soon as it comes out and don't have that game available to them.

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  2. Admit it, no one had any idea that Peace actually hated CSI. We just thought he enjoyed playing CSI while he was drinking. Not that he HAD to drink to play CSI. That was a REAL plot twist.

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  4. I had no idea Sandlot Sluggers gave you so much trouble either. I had to restart the story because I had a girl over who INSISTED that she wanted to play the homerun derby thingy, which I had already won, and I still finished in 5-6 hours total. CSI, on the other hand, had to be spread out over days so that I wouldn't die of alcohol poisoning! edit note, I posted this above and somehow deleted it to change a typo... lol! I'm such a blogger noob!

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