Discover Top Posts Tagged with #mvp baseball

EGM #44, March '93 - Review of ‘Roger Clemens’ MVP Baseball′ on the SEGA Genesis.

#EGM 44 #March '93 #sega #mega drive #genesis #mvp baseball

Who else misses MVP Baseball 2005?

#baseball #MLB #Video #MVP Baseball 2005 #MVP Baseball #Follow

Evolution of Mind

It’s funny, I was at my desk this afternoon when a familiar tune came on, the Hot Hot Heat’s “You Owe me an IOU”, a song that I will forever associate with the baseball videogame, MVP Baseball 2005. I thank MVP baseball 2004 and 2005 for all the hours of rainy day amusement they gave me, and for forever changing the way I think. You see, when I was 9 or 10 and playing these games, I wasn’t as draw to actually playing the games as I was to researching the statistics of players and trying to create guesses by how much they could produce and if they could go to the hall of fame with their numbers. My love of statistics eventually led me to the Baseball-Reference where I spent countless hours researching Baseball’s statistical history, I still do this today. Now, I am capable of calculation complex SABRmetrics and joining discusions with people who analyze baseball for a living, and it’s all thanks to the fact my mother gave me a birthday gift, one copy of MVP Baseball 2005. So thanks mom, and thank you MVP baseball, you have made me a better person today.

#MVP baseball #mind #baseball #SABR

X-Play Classic - MVP Baseball Review

Slug it out.

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Complete Games Free Download

http://www.completepcgames.com/2016/05/17/mvp-baseball-2005-game/

#Games #MVP Baseball #Free Games

A Lifetime of Sports Video Games

The first sports games I played were for the NES in my early childhood 3 or 4 years old. Memorable among them were Baseball and Tennis, two games that faithfully depicted their namesakes to the extent that was possible. They were solid games, but once you got over the novelty of being able to play a real game of baseball, there wasn’t much in these early games to hold my interest. No progression, no variation, no reason to keep playing. The first sports game that truly captured my attention, even before I ever liked sports, was Super Dodgeball.

Super Dodgeball was not realistic, instead it felt like the magic and novelty of video games mixed with the logical and firmly defined world of sports. The established structure of an olympic style tournament is borrowed from the games sports roots, while the hit point counters and special attacks are firmly rooted in the world of video games. That’s right, in super dodgeball you can mash the run button to build up speed and unleash a devastating special attack, each individual player has there own. The frisbee throw, the wobbly Frisbee, 3 balls, and my personal favorite where the ball goes off the screen before reappearing behind the opposing team with a devastating reversal. These special moves were not always easy to execute, but they became the focus of the game. Knowing which guy has which special throw, knowing how to execute the jumping specials, this is the video game roots. There’s a lot of Street Fighter to this game, straight down to the difficult to pull off super moves and the nationally specific stage locations. The overlap of fighting games with sports games is an important way that sports games differentiated themselves and stood out from the crowd in the era before high graphical fidelity allowed for truly realistic representations. Super Dodgeball was outrageous and fun. It showed how early sports games walked the line between simulation and arcade, particularly favoring the sensibility of fighting games to give the game its character. The outrageous sports game is something that seems to have disappeared. I will turn at the end of this essay to Rocket League and discuss how sports games can move forward. The connection between Super Dodgeball and Rocket League should be obvious, although I will spell it out in greater detail later. The importance of arcade sensibilities to sports game is obscured, causing a certain type of sports game to be suppressed. The next major sports game would have to wait until I got my first personal console, an N64. The game: Bottom of the 9th, published by current industry darling Konami. These were the days of All-Star Baseball, I played that at friends house, but Bottom of the 9th was much the same. These were simulation titles that felt a little bit more than rock paper scissors than skillful gameplay. The ultimate problem with these games was a lack of control. I am going to compare them to MVP Baseball, which I consider to be the pinacle of genre which would arrive next generation on the playstation 2 with MVP Baseball 2004. In All-Star Baseball and Bottom of the Night control of hitting and pitching was severely limited. You pushed a button and picked a direction, that was it. It felt like what you could do was limited and it felt like animations were canned and precision was never a necessity. MVP Baseball changed everything by requiring extreme precision. No longer was the placement of your swing as important as your pull and timing. MVP Baseball depended on a system where instead of controlling a reticule that you moved around the batters box, trying to anticipate the location of the pitch, the player instead leaned their body like a real hitter. Pull the analogue stick towards your body for a pull, away from your body to go opposite field. Up to pop the ball up and down to hit a grounder. This system was revolutionary. Now you could swing for the fences on a low hung curveball and actually hit a home run, but more importantly hitting was now all about timing. Instead of needing to hit the exact spot players now needed to swing at the exact right time depending on their swing. Going for a pull, then swing early. Opposite field, swing late. This doubly meant that the batter had more flexability to react. A player might swing early on a pitch away, trying to pull it. The result will be a week bloop up the middle, but a bloop that has the chance to get through. This is what hitting is really like. Timing a swing while gaging balance and controling the level of the bat. Hitting was now complicated enough to be fun and engaging mechanincally in and of itself. A player could spend hundred of hours hitting in MVP Baseball, and believe me I did, and still find that gameplay compelling. The mechanical complexity of MVP Baseball pushed sports games to a new strata. The lesson to take away from Baseball games in the late 90s, early 00s is that an increase in mechanical complexity allowed a form of simulation to evolve to a more compelling form of gameplay. Even if MVP Baseball is a true simulation (although arguments could be made to the contrary concerning element like the hitters eye, which allowed players to recognize the type of pitch (fastball, breaking ball, change up, sinker) out of the pitchers hand, which I personally love and think is a great example of how leaving realism behind can allow for a more compelling experience) it shows how mechanical complexity and innovation pushed sports games forward once changes in graphics ceased to be the driving force in the development of sports games EA lost the MLB license and converted their franchise to college baseball leading to an excellent, but quickly forgotten, MVP Baseball 2006, and MLB The Show opted for authenticity and fidelity over feel. The Show had interesting mechanics, great presentation, and fully fleshed out RPG-like career modes, which would become the norm in other games, but it would never be as fast or as fluid as MVP Baseball. After purchasing the initial entity I fell out of love with baseball games. The game that came closest to recapturing this experience was the arcade baseball game The Bigs for the Xbox 360. Once again speed and smoothness returned to a compelling mechanical expereince. The only problem was this game had the depth of a teaspoon. Even if The Bigs 2 did rectify this with season modes and stat keeping, ultimately it was a short lived return to the glory days of baseball games. The speed and intensity of the game was dialed up to 11 in an arcady mash-up most reminiscent of the style of game of Super Dodgeball, a merging of the simulation with the arcade. Other than that I abandoned my love of baseball games and moved on to other sports titles. Today’s baseball games are monopolized by playstation, but breaths of fresh air like Super Mega Baseball do exist. It seems though that it has been very hard to push the baseball game forward since the mid 2000’s. This stagnation of an entire genre of sport in video-games will come to be all too common to the post 2010 era of sports games. Baseball just appears to be the first sport to have fallen victim.

After transitioning out of baseball, I became smitten with football. I had played Madden games since Madden 2000, but Madden 2004 was really the game that established the modern era of Madden. Madden was important as a learning tool compared to other sports games. Football is an immensely comlicated sport. It’s one thing to understand enough to follow, and entirely different to know enough to actually play the game. For many, Madden is the reason people understand zone versus man coverage. The illustrations brought an understanding of formations, positions, audibling and other techniques and terminology known only to the super fans and former participants. Madden works because its a quite nuanced real time strategy game. Madden had the appeal of a fighting game, a great back and forth game that made up for what it lacked in mechanical complexity with a deep well of strategical choices. The path to Madden’s success for came in a very different form than for MVP Baseball, but it underscores the same point. Adding depth and complexity have been the cornerstones of developing sports genres. Madden is a great lesson. It shows that depth can be introduced to a game outside of the gameplay, but that this depth is fundamentally what made these games endlessly replay-able. A streamlined sports game will never be as compelling, unless its mechanics have an enormous amount of depth. The addition of a career mode breathed new life into Madden around 2006-2007, but that was really the last major innovation to Madden in the single player era of sports games that made a difference (and whatever difference that made was severly limited by the fact that every other sports game went in the same direction. Around this time I moved away from sports games, but I was destined to return. The biggest refinement in sports games of the late 2000’s occured in the realm of soccer games. FIFA 2010 is the game that made the breakthrough, redifining control in soccer games, and changing the standards for mechanical depth in sports games. In the past, FIFA games had been limited by the turnign ability of players. The games only allowed players to face in 8 diferent directions. This meant that subtle adjustments of the direction the player was facing were impossible, animations felt canned, and the gameplay was just never smooth enough. FIFA 10 changed everything by allowing for full 360 degree player movement. The control players could now have on the ball was incredibly smooth and responsive. Combine this movement with the ability to do faints, step overs, and other fancy tricks and suddenly FIFA could advertise the most responsive controls of any sports game. The points I am making are equally true of the NHL games of this period which also evolved to their zenith at this time. The reason these games work is that they are immesely difficult. Anyone who has ever watched soccer can attest to the difficulty of scoring. Scoring a goal in soccer isn’t like making a basket in basketball, which only require one or two successful moves and a skilled release on the shot. No in soccer a goal is a long process of shifting possession that depends on the players ability to string numerous successful passes, dribbles, and fakes, all leading up to the shot, which must be timed with immense precision and deft aim (aim complicated by the horizontal broadcast camera which makes aiming more of a matter of feel, then aim). Because scoring a goal in FIFA is so difficult, the controls have to be extremely responsive. Nobody will put up with a game that requires them to do 20 things perfectly to score a goal if a mistake can be attributed to bad controls. This is why FIFA 10 was such a step forward. Suddenly the amount of control allowed the creators to require much more difficulty and precision from the player, something they could expect from the player because the games mechanics were dependable enough to allow it. Suddenly, the strength of control allowed depth to come from a new source, the difficulty. As you remember, MVP Baseball was fun because of its mechanics, but its difficulty was fairly negligable (I did work my way up to playing computers on MVP, but the super low margin for error as a hitter in that game turned every game into a pitchers duel, and pitching, while immensely fun, was more of a crapshoot than hitting). FIFA’s mechanics work so well because of the difficulty. You are forced to rely on the responsiveness of the controls as you attempt the tricky maneuvers necessary to even net yourself a scoring opportunity in FIFA. While FIFA’s great step up in mechanics is important in its own right, it is how they tailored the difficulty of their game to fit with the new controls that made FIFA such a brilliant success. This time depth in terms of the challenge associated with the experience, and the thrill of actually scoring a goal (and it really is a thrill) is what hooks people to FIFA. Get them in with responsive controls and hook them with challenging, “just one more” gameplay, and you have a game that offers depth from another novel source.

It’s worth emphasizing the fluidity and smoothness of the FIFA experience. FIFA’s greatest strength is that their are few to no breaks in the action. Play goes back and forth, but if a player is skilled at ball control, they can boss possession, just like in real soccer. This is maybe just an aspect of soccer that FIFA captures exceptionally well, but the harmony that the player feels as they pass the ball around their team, Barcelona style, is something that has to be experience. What this is is a feeling of mastery. FIFA isn’t just relentlessly difficult, its also really fair. If you master the games systems, you will dominate. Again this is more characteristic of a fighting game than of most sports games. Playing FIFA well feels like operating a well oiled machine. There’s a joy in matery, and the fact that FIFA can provide that joy is proof of what a reliable and well made system it is. Few other games do I feel as in control as when I play FIFA. This is the kind of feeling we come to expect from video games, but few non-fighting games execute it so masterfully.

Since 2010, little has changed mechanically about sports games. The innovations are all coming in the online space. FIFA cemented its dominance as king of sports games with the introduction of FIFA ultimate team. A fantasy draft online league that allows you to build a team of players from all over the world that you earn from purchasing booster pack earned from playing the game. RPG elements had already improved sports games in the late 2000’s so their inclusion in terms of online progression was a no brainer. However, FIFA ultimate team found a way to make the RPG elements a game in and of itself, and not just a bunch of levels and stats that improve over time. Now every sports game has a mode similar to ultimate team and the battle for supremacy in sports games is being waged on the online battlefield. My worry is that these online modes are themselves a distraction, rather than a source of depth. Does earning points to buy packs to get players really enrich your FIFA experience and make playing more fun, or does it just make playing more addictive by giving you a personalized approach and a dangling carrot. I’m worried that games like Destiny, Fifa and other online success stories (sports or not) don’t actually innovate by making deeper games, instead they make shallower games that have better loops and hooks to get you to keep playing. This method works to some extent, but its an approach that leads to addiction and eventual burnout. I didn’t play FIFA for hundreds of hours because I wanted to level up or get better players, I kept playing because the gameplay was complicated, challenging, and satisfying. Online progression systems never lend themselves to this kind of engagement. They take the focus away from the mechanics and shift it onto an artificial form of progression. The lesson I’m afraid to take away from online games is that they prioritize a form of engagement that has little to nothing to do with the actual experience of the game. I want games that provide new experiences. Not games that provide new ways to progress and show off for friends. I believe the emphasis on progression comes at the expense of gameplay. A drip feed of content doesn’t make the game better, it just cynically keeps people playing games for longer. We want games to be addicting because of the quality of the experience, not because of the hooks included by the developer. These hooks can be valuable to keep you engaged in a game, but good hooks alone are not enough to be satisfying and I think online games often fall into this disconcerting trap. In the present, the sports game of the moment is undoubtably Rocket League. It stands out from simulation sports in many ways. First and foremost, many simulations don’t attempt to simulate the sport as much as they attempt to simulate watching it on tv. This is understandable, considering far more people can relate to the experience of watching football on tv compared to actually playing it. That being said, this decision minimizes the experience of playing a sport as an individual, the experience that has been the core force behind sports appeal for thousands of years. As Danny O’Dwyer of Gamespot says, Rocket League is a soccer game where you play as the foot, and that’s a fundamentally different approach. Like some of my favorite sports games, Rocket League is a fusion of arcade and simulation sensibilities. Only in this case it is not the fighting game being drawn upon, but the arcade racer. Rocket League plays like an arcade racer: rocket boosts, responsive turning, even the ability for cars to jump. Rocket league is fun because this method of control is extremely precise and demands perfect control of your vehicle to achieve mastery. Like FIFA did with 360 degree motion, Rocket League redefines the way you get to think about movement in a sports game. Jumping, flipping, even flying; and all with ultra precise controls. Rocket league takes the necessity for timing to new levels. It’s a game with an extremely high skill cap, but yet is accessible thanks to its familiar driving controls.

Rocket League is exemplary of an unrealized direction for sports games. Sports games as simulation have become the norm, but in many ways they are the antithesis of the precision and skill that are instrumental to an enjoyment of sports. Games that explore new ways to give you control in a sport will always be the most interesting, but providing a deeper experience is still the ultimate goal. We have lost sight of the goal of depth in favor of the goal of scope. We are convinced that we want the most content, that thats what is important. Rocket League is proof of the exact opposite. A game that couldn’t have much less content when it launched has unbelievable depth. Right now, it’s a game that I feel like I could play every day. I used to feel that about other kinds of games in the past. But now its only a sports game that can make me feel that way. That’s important to remember when we think about why sports game are important to this industry.

#video games #sports #Madden #rocket league #mvp baseball #super dodgeball #woffordswords