It’s not that Microsoft didn’t try hard in its first at-bat; the game includes a handful of theoretically fun challenges and the only online play in this year’s batch of Xbox baseball titles. But in creating a sim-like game, the developers have strived to simulate so many different things that the game feels calculating yet cluttered, frantic yet frozen. Send this one back to the minors, Microsoft; it’s got a few seasons left to work on its game.

Inside Pitch 2003 features an admirable mix of standard and unique gameplay modes. In the "vanilla" category you have the single-season, single-game and home run derby modes, all of which offer the traditional fare and hold their own among the other Xbox baseball titles. In the more adventuresome "chocolate" category is the game’s create-a-player mode, in which you can train a player and apply "points" to any combination of character traits you choose. Moving up to "Neopolitan," which includes a bit of everything, you’ll find Championship Challenge, which re-creates some famous scenarios from the 2002 MLB season and invites gamers to see how they handle the situation themselves. The most flavorful mode of the bunch, though, is the online head-to-head play, which allows Live owners to compete against one another for the first time in an Xbox baseball game.

But it’s not all cookies and cream for Inside Pitch 2003. Indeed, the game suffers from some seriously rocky roads. For starters, Inside Pitch 2003 completely lacks a franchise mode. Sure, you can play through an entire season, but once it’s over, it truly is "over." No second season, no dynasties, no gelling of players into a more cohesive unit the second time out. This renders the create-a-player mode somewhat useless as well, because you can only follow your Frankenstein for one season. You’d better hope he has a Golden Glove year his first time out, because you’ll never have the opportunity to improve his stats year after year.

With just a single season to test your mettle, it should come as no surprise that Inside Pitch 2003 tries to be predominantly a drawn-out baseball sim with only an occasional hint of arcade panache. Unfortunately, as calculating as the developers were in their re-creation of pitching, batting and fielding nuances, their efforts often play out in an equally calculating (read: too precise for their own good) manner, which leaves the gameplay feeling somewhat dry.

For example, your pitcher has a standard grid in the strike zone, and you can choose with the left thumbstick where in the grid you want your pitch to end up. Simply press the "strike" or "ball" button, and your pitch will go over the plate accordingly where you instructed it. While this sounds straightforward enough, you’ll soon find that your pitchers are so precise that there’s no "human error" in the game. A strike is always a strike; the pitcher never misses. As a result, hitting the swing button whenever a pitch looks good will virtually assure you of hitting the ball. Although the game may move quickly from pitch to pitch, this overly precise scheme just speeds along the rapidity of predictable outcomes.

When at the plate, you have the option to "reach" throughout the strike zone, a technique that in real life gives you greater control over the ball’s trajectory and can result in an extra base or two. In the video game, though, that theory just doesn’t pan out. Nine times out of 10 you’ll either pop up or ground out, and the remaining one instance will see your ball head straight for left-center field. It’s overly realistic in a sense, and it detracts significantly from the game’s fun factor. There’s a reason ESPN only shows baseball highlights; now what’s the reason Inside Pitch 2003 involves only the boring in-between stuff? (And don’t get me started on the lack of any replay options when the occasional exciting play comes around.)

Fielding is a slightly different story. Despite what others have said about non-responsive or "slow" fielding, I thought the controls for fielding are the one sim-like element that Inside Pitch 2003 hits out of the park. Rather than map the base-throwing to the face buttons, the right thumbstick controls which base you toss the ball to. Press it right, and you throw to first; press it down, and the catcher will be waiting. It’s extremely intuitive, and within a few innings you’ll prefer it to the schemes available on other games.

Actually throwing the ball is very lifelike, because your players won’t throw to a given base as quickly as you can press the thumbstick. Instead, they take some time to pick up the ball, wind up and aim toward the base. Unlike other games, which can turn a throw in no time flat, Inside Pitch 2003 actually simulates the laws of non-double-jointed nature. Sure, its fielders are slower to respond than those in other games, but their motions are a bit more believable at the same time.

The game’s base-running, while complex to control, is equally realistic. You wouldn’t expect a real-life player to stop on a dime and immediately return to a base without tearing his Achilles, so there’s a bit of a delay in Inside Pitch players’ return to their own digital bases. With this realistic feel, though, comes more cussing and tagged-out base-runners than you could ever imagine. And that’s before even talking about base-running, which is ironically atrocious and unrealistic. Unless the bases are loaded, your AI isn’t going to budge, even in the most logical of circumstances. Suffice it to say, the term "AI" for base-runners in Inside Pitch 2003 is probably more likely to stand for "Artificial Idiocy" than anything else.

Looking at the stadiums of Inside Pitch 2003, it’s no surprise the game came from the publisher of the NFL Fever franchise. These stadiums, my friends, are gorgeous. It’s an incredible shame, then, that they’re populated with such flat and repetitive crowds and decorated with such low-resolution textures. From a distance the fields, walls and crowds look all right, but get up close, and it all runs together like a spumoni milkshake.

The player details in Inside Pitch 2003 are impressive, with faces that resemble their real-life counterparts and uniforms that look worn and wrinkled in just the right places. But like the stadiums, it’s a shame that these great-looking characters are defiled by the most annoyingly repetitive animations I’ve seen this side of Fever. Honestly, I got visibly mad at the TV after five innings - in my first game!

I was hoping to find some saving grace in the heads-up display, but to my dismay, it’s crammed with more information than you really need. Your pitcher’s stamina? Put it on the team setup menu next time, not the HUD. Whether you swung to early or too late? Well, that really doesn’t matter, since the next pitch isn’t going to be the same anyway; do away with that meter altogether. The only logical reason I can see for putting these unnecessary bars on the HUD is to cover up the extremely aliased graphics, which often make it look like you’re playing the game through a sieve.

While others have said the environmental sounds in Inside Pitch 2003 make poor use of the surround speakers, I thought the environmental sounds were among the best of 2003’s Xbox baseball games. I haven’t been to a lot of real-life games, but what I recall of those I’ve been to is precisely what you’ll hear in Inside Pitch. From slight echoes in the stands to hecklers in the distance and the occasional PA announcement, Inside Pitch 2003 puts you in the ballpark like no other Xbox game before it.

The play-by-play calling is par for the course, but unlike most sports titles, which suffer occasionally from the infamous "two-plays-late" lag, the two-man crew in Inside Pitch does a good job of keeping up with the Andru Joneses. The play-by-play also has a knack for keeping the comments fresh throughout, with little trivia about the individual teams or stadiums presented at just the right moments. If you find yourself getting tired of the play-by-play, though, you can at least start grooving to your custom soundtrack, the option for which Inside Pitch supports.

In this section we like to talk about those aspects of the game that will keep you playing over and over again. Well, even in spite of the online head-to-head play and Live leaderboard, you probably won’t be playing Inside Pitch for more than five days. With the overly precise handling and poor AI, not to mention the beta-like overall graphical quality, you and a friend will have to be really desperate to play a baseball game online to keep playing Inside Pitch. There are just too many contenders out there this year to not play the best of the bunch, and Inside Pitch is not among them.

Also, as I mentioned, while the game includes a replayability-friendly create-a-player mode, the lack of a franchise option kills any hope of that mode sustaining your interest for more than a season. After all, if you can’t watch your player improve his skills over multiple seasons, what’s the point of creating a player in the first place?

While Microsoft Game Studios made a good effort with Inside Pitch 2003, they were far from making a good game. In a 2003 Xbox stable rife with good baseball games, Inside Pitch just falls victim to its own misgivings. The online play should have been a huge boost for the game, but its most basic gameplay elements drain all life from the game and feel too cold and calculating for a sport played during hot summer nights full of surprises. You’re better off buying just about any other baseball game out there for Xbox, online play or not.