Homerun Battle 2 Android Full Version
Darnell Rempe
Call it an Achilles Heel, but having played the Android version I've ended up with an iPhone version too. So despite my real-life four-hour boredom stint watching the San Diego Padres a couple of years ago, I now have to consider myself a baseball convert, at least when it comes to this super casual incarnation of the sport.
You control your swing by tilting your phone, which moves a small, white lozenge on the screen. This represents the bat's envelope and you want to place it over the ball just as you hit it. The tricky bit is timing your swing, which you do by tapping anywhere on the screen.
Get these two right and you'll whack the ball over the outfield, direction and trajectory dependent on which part of the bat you used and the instant you hit it. It's a really fluid control method which, when you become an expert, enables you to pick where and how hard you want to hit the ball.
Combined with the sharp cartoon graphics, the celebratory slo-mo replay when you catch a pitch just right, and neat particle effects when you hit the ball out the stadium, the whole experience is totally addictive.
More challenging is the Classic mode, as any ball that isn't a home run (i.e. hit over the boundary) will count as an out. And there's a training option, which you can use to set up different styles of pitcher to test yourself against.
Finally, there's the robust online real-time Matchup mode (via 3G or wi-fi), which sees you take on a human player head-to-head to see who can be the first to get a certain distance of homeruns, as displayed by the filling up of each of your beat-'em-up type bar meters. The winner gains points from the loser and moves a little bit further up the global leaderboard.
It was fine on my G1 but only after I had shut down and restarted to kill all the apps running in the background. When I didn't do this, it ran like a dog and was sometimes unplayable, even in single player, let alone in Matchup, mode.
Of course, on a newer phone such as Droid/Milestone, Nexus or G2, it will no doubt run much smoother without a restart, but this sort of thing can occur on a iPhone running a lot of background apps, so it's not an Android issue, just something you need to be aware of.
Filling out the rest of the game's features are the customisation options that enable you to change your batter's hat, glasses, clothes, shoes and bat using the special gold balls you occasionally get pitched.
All-in-all, then, Com2uS has performed an excellent job making this Android version of Homerun Battle 3D. Even if there wasn't a lack of decent games on the platform, it would be counted among one of the best available.
I have a strange relationship with North American sports, but their key characteristic is endlessly mesmerising: spectacle. Every year I watch the Superbowl, just about following the game but always enjoying the show. Even calling it a game is wrong: it's an event. This is the only culture in the world that could have created sports entertainment.
Spectacle is fascinating in and of itself, but its magical effect is in focusing people's attention on the moments that matter - blowing them up on a stadium-sized screen and replaying that hit or miss five times before the next act. Catch or fumble. Homerun or out. Baseball is a game with many aspects, but that second when bat meets ball is what everything revolves around.
Homerun Battle 3D hits it out of the park. This gem of a game is all about that one moment, over and over, because nothing else matters. Your slugger stands on his patch, the pitch-perfect tilt controls move the bat, and one irrevocable tap swings.
At first it's nice just to score a hit. Then you realise that not only are homeruns worth more, but getting them in a row stacks the points up. The real Homerun Battle 3D starts here. Though the game offers some pretty great single-player options, you'll barely touch them, because this is all about multiplayer.
It offers the fastest matchmaking on iOS, linking you up with someone in seconds, and lets each player check out the other's garb and stats before committing. The organ's playing a warm-up tune as you step up to the plate, one second to get set, and game on.
Homerun Battle's most delicious touch is a screen in the top-right corner where you can see your opponent's swings. You quickly learn to parse the effects without looking directly at it, so you'll always have an idea where they're at without taking your eye off the ball. It can be hard. Some games you win and some games you lose, but Homerun Battle's greatest achievement is making you nervous, making you sweat. When there's the chance to close out a game but the other guy's coming on strong, there's nowhere to hide
In other games you soar. The balls fly left, down the centre, out to the right - and the 'cycling' logo comes up on screen. Your slugger calls the shots before the pitcher even throws, and you crack those balls where they need to go. The crowd is going berserk. Your score's off the charts. Your opponent has left the room.
If you're interested in Homerun Battle 3D, there's a free version, but avoid the sequel. Much as I am loath to describe a game as a faithless dog, Homerun Battle 3D 2 sullies the perfect formula of the original with too many 'special' balls and unnecessary frills. This original is what captures something of baseball. Not the scale or complexity, but the single key moment on which all those other things turn.
Homerun Battle 3D is in some respects limited - after all, it only offers one interaction you repeat again and again. But in making that one interaction mean so much, in squeezing a whole sport's worth of spectacle into that fraction of a second, it becomes much more than a swing. It's more than a hit; it's more than a homerun; it's even more than a release. For that fraction of time, in your whole being, it's everything.
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Pretty strong, that is how I feel about my credentials for this article, not only as a Facebook Ads ninja but also as a proud new parent. The pride and joy of our life is our 1 year old daughter, Baby Gia, while the pride and our professional life is our ability to produce and publish effective Facebook Ad campaigns and sales funnels.
It was not too long ago, this past weekend actually, I was checking my Facebook Ads app on my phone every 15 minutes while overseeing mischievous Baby Gia. This turned into a vicious cycle of watching Baby Gia and monitoring ads, then I realized some similarities between the two. Parenthood and Facebook Ads can be summarized in one word; NURTURING!
You see a new toy or some cute clothes at a store and think to yourself, "GOTTA have that." Budgeting time, money and resources while raising a child is very similar to budgeting your time, money and resources for advertising. Occasional impulse purchases is fun and satisfying but when impulse buying becomes a habit, "Houston, we have a problem."
The impulse buy and "sexy" thing to do in Facebook Advertising is the "Boost Post". It kills me that so many businesses, brands and even marketers are resorting to this tactic, mainly because the alternatives (Facebook Ad Manager/Power Editor) are not well known to them. If content is really worth promoting then certainly "Boost Post" has value but please employ this tactic with an overall strategy and plan in place, it WILL completely suck your advertising budget from underneath you and leave you with ZERO return on investment.
WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT THIS - CALL TO ACTION: The Facebook impulse buy is the "Boost Post" button. It is simple and "sexy", the satisfaction is immediate however short lived. My recommendation is that at the very least, become familiar with the alternatives; 1) do a little bit of research and 2) follow and read some of the prominent Facebook advertisers, here are some of my favs;
Everybody loves a cute baby, right? Cute baby pictures and videos are a great way to keep family and friends informed and engaged with the development of your newborn. We all love those likes, shares and comments however the ultimate goal is to share the experience and add value to the lives of family and friends and keep them engaged.
Facebook Ads are great BUT too many of use measure the success (or failure) of any given Facebook post by likes, comments and shares. True, these metrics (likes, comments and shares) are a great measurement of engagement. Engagement sometimes comes at the risk of not focusing on the priorities like MAKING MONEY, instead we focus on popularity. Trust me when I say this, I have published hundreds of ads with ZERO engagement (likes, comments and shares) that have turned out to be EXTREMELY effective for lead generation.
WHAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT THIS - CALL TO ACTION: Learn about and understand the different ad types available for Facebook Ads. When publishing an ad on Facebook, ensure that your objective matches the ad type (also known as campaign objective), see image below (circles are the ad types that historically have the best ROI for us) or click here for more info.
Similar to Likes, Comments and Share, the Facebook metric Video Views is a great way to measure how much your baby is loved throughout your social media network(s). As parents, most of us are very selective about our privacy settings to make sure videos of our babies are not public but we still love that others love our pride and joy!
The same applies to video views, and video view ads, for business purposes. Video views are a GREAT metric for measuring video engagement BUT it is not necessarily a measure of the effectiveness of a video view ad. Our focus is on viewership completion rates, we find that to be a much more effective metric (as do most Facebook experts).
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