Diabolical Pitch (Xbox 360)
When designing for a novel piece of hardware like the Kinect motion sensor, it’s easy for developers to get wrapped up in what the player is doing rather than why they are doing it. Controlling a game with your entire body is nifty, but it needs proper direction for what you’re doing to actually be entertaining, and Grasshopper Manufacture’s Diabolical Pitch has the right degree of focus on why you’re pretending to pitch baseballs to push it beyond the realm of curiosity into a game that can be enjoyed on its own merits.
Diabolical Pitch tells the tale of a baseball pitcher named McAllister whose legendary career suddenly comes to a screeching halt as he throws out his arm at the end of a game. Devastated, he feels directionless and almost ends up in a fatal car crash when instead he awakens in an eerie amusement park known as Queen Christine’s Dream Land. An animatronic with a cow head serves as his guide and confidant as the pitcher seeks an audience with Queen Christine who promises to make a person’s dream come true should they reach her castle, but it seems like the amusement park is not only dangerous to traverse, but it aims to lead McAllister astray. His guide and even Queen Christine herself keep prodding at McAllister’s morality and world view, trying to push him towards greedier dreams perhaps as a test of character, and while the story scenes mostly serve as brief introductions to new sections of the amusement park, it feels like it adds just the right amount of plot to the affair without slowing things down too much. It’s a supernatural story but also a classic tale of a guy who loves baseball to his core, a solid framework to hang a 20 level adventure across five themed sections of the park.
The goal of a normal level of Diabolical Pitch is technically just to survive to the end, but to do so, McAllister has been given a replacement arm that not only allows him to pitch again, but do so with incredible power. Filling in McAllister’s shoes, you’ll need to hurl baseballs at animatronics with animal heads that pop up in the different sections of the amusement park, and one of the first and perhaps smartest choices in design you’ll come across is that Diabolical Pitch does not expect you to play like a pitcher. The wind-up and strong throw expected in baseball would be far too slow to deal with the busier moments when animatronics close in, so instead, you utilize your dominant hand and can throw overhand almost like you’re hurling snowballs instead of baseballs. You will need to pitch in the general direction of a target but the game usually does a pretty clean job of parsing your intent, and even when it doesn’t you’re still likely to hit a viable target off to the side rather than just whiffing a throw through open air. Your non-dominant hand can serve a purpose too, as you can raise it and aim at targets to initiate a lock-on if you want to be absolutely precise. A lock-on also increase the power of your throw and is necessary for harming certain animatronics at all, and while the lock-on could be a little quicker to detect your intention, it is possible to mix it in well with throws and be more effective at robot smashing thanks to it.
Throughout most of the adventure, you technically just need the basic throwing gesture and the lock-on to succeed. Simple, effective, but also satisfying as you do need a bit of force behind throws for them to register but not so much you will end up throwing your arm out yourself. Rather smartly, there is a limit put on how fast you can pitch too, fatigue building up if you try to throw too rapidly. Not only does this ensure you don’t wear yourself ragged, it makes you manage your rhythm more and be a bit selective when there are plenty of targets in play. There are times you do need to make different motions though, but thankfully these don’t overcomplicate things. Sometimes an incoming attack will require you to dodge in some manner, but this is handled in a way that helps avoid potential frustration. While normal enemies just need to be beaten before they reach you to avoid injury, when a sawblade or enemy pitch comes towards you, the action will stop for a bit and shift to a warning of the incoming attack. From there, you need to perform the right motion to stop it, this being to thrust your arms out to grab the ball or if its a high or low attack you need to duck or jump instead. The game does give some good leeway so a mild duck or a little hop can usually clear what could have been demanding actions, and breaking from normal gameplay to ensure you have a chance to respond means you don’t have to worry about missing danger since the screen can often become filled with effects such as the coins bursting out of defeated robots.
One final bit of motion sensing the Kinect is used for is the titular Diabolical Pitches. You can build up energy by nailing animatronics with your pitches and doing so actually rather rapidly builds up power for the Diabolical Pitch you set before you start a level. You’ll gradually be able to unlock new Diabolical Pitches as the game goes on, each of them having different advantages as well as a different pose required to enable them. For example, one that lets you bat balls through robots with ease requires you to stand as if you had a baseball bat ready, while the Diabolical Pitch that turns your arm into a cannon is a less natural gesture but also made easy to perform when desired since an on-screen indicator will show you the pose required. Admittedly, this might be the one spot where Diabolical Pitch can be a little sloppy. Perhaps my height was a bit of a factor, but trying to activate ones that asked me to raise my hands too high lead to them failing to activate, but there are easier to use options that are still incredibly effective when needed as they can often blow away crowds or break through defenses like shields.
The animatronics you face in Diabolical Pitch keep evolving as you travel through the different regions of the amusement park like the horror area and space world. At first you’re eased in with less intelligent ones that just march towards you, but you start getting those attackers who pitch back as well as bigger guys that take more punishment before going down. At the same time, the sturdy elephant robots can be used to ricochet your ball into other enemies, leading to some interesting strategy if you plan your choice of targets right. Later levels start to introduce flying foes and ones who try to reach a lever that will dump you into a pit teeming with robots, but each normal stage also features a boss that serves as some sort of upgrade to the animatronics you’ve been facing. While it may just look like the elephant or panda robots with a crown and an odd aura, they can introduce entirely new strategies like riding around in a UFO you need to hit enough to make them dizzy before they reach you or a visual test where they make imperfect copies of themselves and you need to hit the real one before it’s too late.
Diabolical Pitch thankfully avoids becoming repetitive because it keeps rolling out new ideas for how the enemies try to approach or attack you, but that’s not the only thing you’ll do during a level. There are coins to collect to unlock new Diabolical Pitches as well as upgrades to your power or scoring potential. Score is mostly just there as something to shoot for, but defeating enemies well and clearing the bonus stage at the end of most worlds will let you earn the cash needed to buy the often rather pricey cards needed to unlock new goodies. While it would have been nice to be able to more often unlock things, it does feel rewarding to finally build up to a permanent power boost and one that can definitely feel meaningful as you enter the later stages where swathes of animatronics can spawn it at once. There are helpful pick-ups and ways to boost your score in level though. Pitching towards slot machine symbols can give you good payouts if you get three in a row of the same type, but pick-ups like health refills, golden gloves that automatically catch incoming fire, and cleats that let you kick away enemies that get in too close are almost always worth grabbing when they appear yet they require swift pitching to get as well as good judgment so you don’t leave yourself open as you greedily go for items instead of enemies. With possible two-player co-op as an option as well, it’s easy to get swept up into the energy of a round of Diabolical Pitch, players needing to manage their activity well to earn as much as they can while avoiding fatigue and taking out the animatronics before you’re knocked out of commission.
THE VERDICT: Diabolical Pitch barely ever rubs up against Kinect detection issues meaning the player is instead able to enjoy the thrilling act of throwing fastballs at murderous robots and watching them break into a shower of coins. Your own motions are easy to execute but as new dangers are introduced and things became tougher you need to be more strategic than pitching at every animatronic you see, Diabolical Pitch having an effective rollout of varied enemy types and unique boss gimmicks to make the action engaging. It can feel like you earn cash a bit too slowly to embrace the shop, but finally grabbing a good upgrade is certainly satisfying as Diabolical Pitch’s design allows for difficult battles where you’ll never be blaming the Kinect for your failures.
And so, I give Diabolical Pitch for Xbox 360…
A GOOD rating. At present, Diabolical Pitch is definitely the best Kinect game I’ve played and it’s for the very simple reason that it knew to build on a type of motion control that wouldn’t be prone to error. The game has a keen eye for the intent of your throws and even when you hit something besides what you were aiming for, it’s usually because it’s right next to what you pitched at and you won’t really resent hitting it. The lock-on is a very wise and useful feature though even if it could do with being a little quicker to fully latch onto your desired target, but it means when hitting what you’re aiming for is vital you can guarantee that shot and even if it’s not necessarily important, the increased power is a nice way of speeding up how quickly you take down animatronics without potentially triggering fatigue. The Diabolical Pitches being effective and not too uncommon makes them a great addition as you can sometimes come back from a mistake or handle an otherwise massive crowd quickly. They have their limits too so stages won’t become absolute breezes because of those special pitches, and because most every stage at least tries to be inventive by way of the boss fight, things don’t grow repetitive either. Admittedly, some more extravagant bosses besides the final one could have been a nice touch and some detection for Diabolical Pitch poses could have been more lenient. Once you’ve get a feel for how quickly you can pitch and how to adjust your methods to accomodate your range of options though, Diabolical Pitch has great physicality and gameplay features that make you feel like you’re doing much more than merely mimicking baseball pitches.
The real sign of effective hardware is when the associated software goes from trying to concoct neat looking applications to producing designs that don’t lean on novelty to be enjoyable. Diabolical Pitch could work as a sort of standard arcade style game since the focus is on hitting targets quickly but intelligently and there are a range of factors like score and coin collection to motivate you to do better. However, by being a Kinect game, it can also be quite thrilling to get up and actually pitch those throws that obliterate the machines and it even gives you a degree of accuracy in targeting greater than a control stick or buttons might have. I don’t think Diabolical Pitch needs the Kinect to be fun but it benefits from it because it adds a kinetic element that barely ever causes any issues. In a sea of games sunk by catering to Kinect gimmickry too hard, Diabolical Pitch stays afloat by remembering to put the focus on gameplay substance over all else.