The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice for Wii Reviews by Gamers

I can't say enough bad things about this game.

It's from Konami and the music and graphics remind me of all of the Konami games from the NES. If this was 1991, that might be a good thing, but in 2010 on the Wii, it's the worst. In fact, it's shovelware like this that give the Wii the reputation of not being a serious gaming platform, but I digress.

The UI is barely usable. This is the first game I've played where you're better off not using the motion plus. You take the motion plus off, and it's slightly usable, if not tolerable. It has the most clunky set of settings available. Most of the time it won't even let you get out of the screen you're in. There are a lot of points where all you can do is push B and swing until you get to a different screen where you can finally call up the menu. I actually found myself using the Wii home menu the most often to get where I needed to go, basically restarting the game.

Keep in mind that I'm a grown adult. I don't even know how a kid would even play it, let alone enjoy it. The game offers a lot of different "perspectives" so that you can try to not be terrible, but I found them all to be awful.

Let me be clear, this is a batting cage game, I didn't have high expectations, but I did expect that you could get in there, just swing for the fences, and have a good time. You can't even do that. Under the best circumstances you will only get pitched to every 10 seconds. That is super slow. Sit there and count to ten, thing about how long that is in what is supposed to be a fast-paced video game. A real pitching machine is much faster.

This game is garbage. Don't waste a precious rental slot getting it. Don't buy it, no matter how cheap it gets. And if, after reading this whole review, you do anyway, well, just know that "I told you so!"

If there’s one thing I learned from playing The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice is that I’m a very bad baseball player.
This game gives players the opportunity to take swings against 19 different types of pitches like the regular fastball, the off speed pitch, or the curve ball.
But when you first get into the game, you can only get one pitch - the standard fastball. To get the others, you’ll have to go through the Training Mode of the game - thirty exercises that start off with hitting a stationary, floating ball to hitting a certain pitch into the outfield a few times to scoring a set number of runs before getting three outs.
This would be good if the controls were user friendly, and if the game tells us what’s wrong with my swing when I fail to get a hit. But this game doesn’t do that.
After each botched swing, it shows us the path of the bat through its swing (a floating bat no less) as it misses the ball. This shows us how I missed the hit, but it does not explain why I missed the hit. Is my stance wrong? Am I holding the bat the wrong way? How do I correct the swing so I don’t make the mistake again? These are questions that the game will not answer.
Instead, it makes me take another swing and another swing, and I’m making the same mistake over and over again. This can make the game frustrating.
Oddly enough, this is one game that I found more success playing without the WiiMotion Plus attachment. With the attachment, any flaws in my swing are magnified, and I look like an idiot trying to get that hit.
Speaking of bad looks, the game’s graphics are bland and unappealing; we’re in a eyesore of a ballpark cheered on by horrendously rendered fans.
There’s multiplayer available here, but the overly exact gameplay takes the fun out of finding out who can get the most home runs, get the most distance in a set number of pitches or score the most runs.
The Cages: Pro Style Batting Practice is too demanding for me to enjoy. SKIP IT.