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Clutch Hitter

SCORE: 76

There is something so interesting to me about playing a plethora of retro video games. Especially when we are talking about retro sports video games. It gets even more interesting when these retro sports video games are on a hand held. That means the programmers had less memory to work with. Where would they compromise? What kind of a game would you expect? Those were thoughts swirling around my head like that Dreamcast video game when I started to play Clutch Hitter on the Game Gear.

Clutch Hitter is like a lot of baseball video games from that era. What do I mean by that? Clutch Hitter is hard. The AI is not very forgiving to the player in terms of making mistakes. There is no difficulty adjustment in Clutch Hitter. You must be better if you want to win. You must minimize your mistakes and maximize your opportunities. To be fair I had a real challenging with the batting in Clutch Hitter. Why? I could never tell where the ball would go after I made contact. I also had to anticipate the pitch and ball and swing a bit ahead of when I would want to if I wanted to actually make contact.

Clutch Hitter looks great for the Game Gear. Clutch Hitter also sounds wonderful. There is an option to turn off the music in case you do not like it. Which is a nice option in my book. Clutch Hitter can be played by one or two players. We can pick all of the baseball teams from that era and play in five, seven, or nine inning games. Pitching is actually enjoyable in Clutch Hitter. We move the pitcher around and I experimented with different pitches.

The AI base running in Clutch Hitter is not very intelligent. I threw out the other team quite frequently. My runners were equally as intelligent. I got thrown out trying to get them to go back on a fly out. Fielding is not the greatest in Clutch Hitter since we control multiple players at the same time. I like the different views for pitching and batting in Clutch Hitter. I found this game to be hard. Even picking a good team against a bad team I was challenged to score, and stop them from scoring. This game would require a lot of practice.
- Paul

Graphics: 85%
Sound: 85%
Replay/Extras: 75%
Gameplay: 60%
Family Friendly Factor: 75%

System: Game Gear
Publisher: Sega
Developer: Sega
Rating: ‘NR’ - Not Rated