Mike Piazza's Strike Zone

Mike Piazza's Strike Zone is a baseball game licensed by Major League Baseball and was released for the Nintendo 64. It was developed by Devil's Thumb Entertainment and released on June 16, 1998, by GT Interactive. While being endorsed by Mike Piazza, Strike Zone represents all of the MLB players in the 1997–98 season including those in the National League and American League. The game offers standard baseball game play with all 30 official stadiums, a choice of leagues to play for, but also offers the player the option to design their own team and league, from the logo, and uniforms all the way up to player abilities and appearance. The player can play a single game, season of 15, 81, or 162 games,[1] the World Series game, All-Star Game, or compete in a batting challenge known as the Home Run Derby.

Mike Piazza's Strike Zone
North American Nintendo 64 cover art
Developer(s)Devil's Thumb Entertainment
Publisher(s)GT Interactive
Platform(s)Nintendo 64
Release
  • NA: June 16, 1998
Genre(s)Sports
Mode(s)Single player, Two player

Gameplay

The official players in Mike Piazza's Strike Zone have different batting and pitching styles as well as stamina that causes them to perform with less precision after being used continuously. When batting the ball has a flame-like trail behind it that tells the hitter whether it is in the Strike Zone (red) or in the Ball Zone (blue), allowing the player to better choose which balls to hit. Saving the season, and saving a player created team, require separate Controller Paks.[2] While playing with a Rumble Pak it cannot be replaced with the Controller Pak while the game is being played, and a separate controller is needed to save.[3]

Reception

With a long list of customizable features and early test previews, the game received good previews from gaming sites such as IGN.[4] When finally released, however, the game was criticized for its graphics, few voice clips, continuous sound elements repeating themselves over and over, simple challenges and unrealistic home run hitting. It was compared to contemporary games such as All-Star Baseball '99 and Major League Baseball Featuring Ken Griffey Jr., both released for N64 that same year.[5] The game would generally receive low scores from the gaming media.

Next Generation reviewed the Nintendo 64 version of the game, rating it one star out of five, and stated that "There are really only two baseball choices for Nintendo 64 this year – and Strike Zone isn't one of them."[6]

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gollark: Arbitrarily linked lists: each node stores a fixed-size list of pointers to other random nodes (as well as the index, of course).
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gollark: And I'm not sure what it would only be better than.
gollark: I mean, memorywise.

See also

References
  1. Instruction Booklet, page 9
  2. Nintendo Power issue 110, page 65
  3. Instruction Booklet, page 15
  4. http://ign64.ign.com/articles/122/122276p1.html IGN preview
  5. http://ign64.ign.com/articles/152/152276p1.html IGN.com review of Mike Piazza's Strike Zone
  6. "Finals". Next Generation. No. 44. Imagine Media. August 1998. p. 94.
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