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Acclaim will have to face far more competition in this year's N64 baseball season. Not only is Nintendo's Ken Griffey Jr. 2 looming on the horizon, but games from Konami and EA Sports will crowd spring training. Today, Acclaim stopped by with an early version of All-Star Baseball 2000 for the N64 and here are some of the new features that impressed us.

3D Batting Cursor
This is cool. It allows you to control the angle of the swing. By holding the A button before the pitch, the player can angle the cursor up or down and inside or out. This makes it easy to hit the sacrifice fly or hit behind the runner.

Player Create
There are no drastic changes to this mode, but it does include over 80 different batter stances featuring both MLB players and standard.

Fantasy Draft
Last year's draft mode was definitely goofy, but Acclaim promises to have all the features to make the stats freak go nuts.

New Animation
There are a bunch of new throwing and fielding animations, but the best addition is the new batting animation. The players in this year's game actually look like they've swung a bat before.

Instant Replay
A feature that was missing in the previous installment is included for the new season. As this version is still not complete, the big unknown is still the computer AI. Last year's game proved to have a number of problems with computer intelligence and we could not pass judgment on ASB '00 in the brief time we played. That aside, ASB 2000 is looking good and should make it to stores by opening day (April 1).