I started playing this game and my brain itched, had I played this game before or was I just channeling the memories of a 15-year-old Japanese boy named Hiro (who could later control time - pop culture ref #2 today)? I started digging around and couldn’t find a review I had written about a previous version but I know I did it.

Anyway, Baseball Superstars 2010 is another in the line of BS titles, er Baseball Superstars, not the other BS. It takes an over-the-top approach to America’s pastime (in a very Japanese way) and gives special players super powers to alter the flow of the game.

But really, at its core, it is baseball and a fine baseball game it is. YOu have multiple modes so you have a choice how you want to play. You have everything from exhibition matches to leagues, seasons, a homerun derby and even mission mode (for batters or pitchers) where you need to accomplish certain goals. This all amounts to tons of ways to play and a big replay value because if you like baseball and/or Japanese-style games you’ll love this one.

The graphics are very SNES-like but still upgraded so the game looks nice in the places it needs to. The sound, is as always, annoying. That’s something that I always disliked personally about a lot of Japanese-style games, the annoying and repetitive sounds that the players make etc. The poor thing here is that the sound options only allow you to turn on/off the background music and/or the sound effects. If you could choose to keep the baseball sounds but get rid of all the character voices and stuff it would have been brilliant. As it is, sometimes I want to toss the iPhone across the room because playing with no sound is lame.

The game even includes online leaderboards for many of the game modes and all it takes to get in is a username which you can input the first time you access them. The gameplay itself is quite fine with a great control scheme of choose your pitch, choose your location (pitcher) or choose your position and swing at will (batter). Fielding is fairly easy with a simple four-direction control for throwing.

What tips the game off kilter and ruins a lot of the fun is how good the computer teams are. Even without their special players they can manage to hit pitches that even real MLB players probably couldn’t without a good dose of the ole’ juice. So that makes the game difficult to win at times.

Overall, it’s a classic combination of baseball and Japanese-ness which many will love, some will hate but all should at least look into if you’re a baseball fan. This isn’t baseball sim, this is arcade baseball at perhaps some of its finest.

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