One wonders if the DS consumer sees the title “Fantasy All-Stars” and thinks, yes, this will be great with my fantasy team, or instead will think “fantasy like being up in the clouds with bunnies and unicorns.” If you guessed the latter, than boy do we have a baseball game for you!

If there’s anything we should give Deep Fried Entertainment and 2K Games credit for, it’s the ability to try something new, as you probably haven’t seen a baseball game like this in some time: it’s baseball played in weird stadiums with power ups for batting, pitching and fielding. It would have been nice if the stadiums affected the gameplay—maybe being in a stadium that’s very cold would affect the ball physics, but really all you’re seeing that’s different is the distance to the fence with a different exterior.

As you might expect from a DS baseball game, options are extremely limited: you can play a ‘fantasy pennant’ which is basically a team tournament; you can play a single player game, play multiplayer online or do some training. Interestingly enough, the ability to create your own ‘power’ team is available. In an exhibition game, you can choose the teams and stadium you’re playing in; however some stadiums are locked at the beginning of the game.

Unfortunately the manual is atrocious in helping you play a game (not even telling you a game lasts 5 innings); the online help is required reading in order to figure out how to pitch the ball. You see, when you pitch, you have to use the stylus in a way to mimic the pitch you want to throw and its location. While a fastball is thrown in a straight down motion, a curveball will require a curved line using the stylus. You can’t choose your height when throwing; you can only just location (inside, outside, or over the plate). The pitching model works pretty well after you’ve memorized the commands for the pitches – they are not available to you except on a help screen, which is annoying.

Batting on the other hand is just plain miserable. The concept is very good – use the stylus to grab the bat and swing in a curved motion as if you were swinging at the ball. If only it played as well as it sounded. Getting the motion down in the heat of the action is extremely difficult; not only that you have to swing very fast in order to make good contact on the ball. Many ‘swings’ ended up as bunts – but that’s okay because fielding is a problem too.

The fielding is what really ruins the game. It would have made more sense to just allow a player to guide their fielder using the stylus, but instead you must use either the d-pad or the x/y/a/b buttons to control him, which poses a major problem for left handed stylus users like me. Controlling a fielder with four buttons is very unresponsive, what’s more is that while holding the DS and fielding, it was very easy to hit the R trigger button, which then selected another fielder which was rather inconvenient to say the least.

While the use of power ups may offend purists, it’s easy to see why they tried to make the game more accessible to kids. The “chicken” batting power up turns the ball into a chicken, making it harder to field and it’ll run all over the place. It’s cute and usually getting a power up like this makes for some strategy – use the pitching one when there’s two outs and two strikes; use the batting one for when you already have someone on base, etc; however just fielding in a regular game is a challenge for me.

The pennant/tournament is cute; it uses hall of famers as coaches to manage the current teams; manage is a misnomer, as there really isn’t much to manage here. Multiplayer works if you can find someone to play online; good luck with that!

Overall, while it’s nice to see someone try to make a baseball game that’s a little different from the norm, it still needs to be user friendly and easy to play; instead it’s an extremely frustrating game for lefties and a barely passable game for right handed players and is best saved for the younger crowd as a rental.

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