So last week we had a number of articles on a broad range of games. However, there were also a number of noteworthy comments from our readers that stuck out just as much. This week, we take a step back and highlight some of these comments.

More on Baseball

Our first comment comes from JoeRyan33 in response to Chris Sanner’s “The Most Important Baseball Stat?” article:

“OBP only tells you how much a hitter gets on base. It tells you nothing about how he got there. Any statistic that rates a walk and a home run identically is poor measure of a hitter. You can't walk around the bases, someone has to drive runners in. Also, take a look at your average singles hitter and you'll see the lack of actual run production.

Bank on your extra base hits. Doubles hitters keep rallies alive.

SLG tells you a lot more about a hitter, and correlates better with actual production. But then I prefer to use the raw numbers to make assessments, giving each possible result their own value.

The question becomes, what is the value of a double, a home run, etc?”

This really embodies exactly why statistics in baseball, well, any sport really, are a flawed measure of any player’s talent. Think about it for a second, what happens if a guy makes a sac bunt to drive a guy in? If he does this often enough, it will bring his OBP down despite bringing his RBI’s up. While the increase in RBI’s really do help the team, the out still potentially brings his efficiency down in terms of stats.

Forza and the Next Step, Pt. 2

Our second great comment comes from fishstick in response to my article, “How Can Forza Take the Next Step?”

“Forza has the physics engine down solid. Great car customization and a good array of cars to select from - I hate when 'the next level' to most is more cars and better graphics. Those two things do not make a cake - those are icing on the cake.

A big area of contention in Forza is the single player game. What Forza needs to do is build a career that is a racers life - be a pro. The management/franchise side of a sports game. Hire a top mechanic and get better default setups. Hire a top crew chief and get faster pit stops. Hire a better manager and get better [sponsors]. Build a team. Build a car. Hire a teammate. There is so many places this can go that it is a shame all race game boil down to a bunch of quick disjointed sprint races for a pot of money used to buy disposable cars. Car collecting IS NOT NEXT GEN.

As far as online, the team needs to again look at sport games. Why are there no player created leagues, ladders and tournaments? Why can you not have pre-race qualifying and testing? Why are pit stops made insignificant in race games when they are everything in real life? Give me pits that mean something. Let me select what gets worked on and let that decide how long I am stuck in the pits. Let host toggle options for [accelerated] tire/fuel [wear] so you have a need for a pit stop in a stunted 10 or 15 lap race.

Take it one further and make my online lobby like LFS so you can drive around until the host queues up a race. Even better, let drivers pull into the pits (during the lobby) and get out and walk around in first person to look at each others cars.

And what about Forza theater? First fix the [replay] system so it is like watching a race on TV, not this garbage they have now. Let people FF/RW and move the camera [around] how ever they like if they don't like the TV view. Then let them bring friends in to watch their films just like Halo 3 does.

There is just so many places Forza 3 can go it will be a shame if all they do is add cars and a few tracks...or worse yet try turn it into yet another shallow arcade romp.”

There are two big things that stick out for me. The first is player created online tournaments, leagues and ladders. This would bring an uncanny amount of immersion into the online aspect and increase the life-cycle of the game even more than it did with Forza Motorsport 2. Not only that, but no longer would you have to only meet a specific, sometimes nearly impossible, qualifying time just to get into the tournaments hosted by Turn 10. Online leagues would also be great as it would allow for leagues set up out of the game to have some sort of an interface in-game where they can organize for races.

The second thing that stuck out for me was fixing the replay system. While I touched on it in the article, this is really the embodiment of what needs to be fixed. There really is a need for not only free-roaming, but also including friends so you can show off the replays you saved.

Still Missing

For our final comment, we look to theaub's response to “Where Are They Now? Features That Are MIA.”

“The one thing I really miss about NHL '94, is that during the intermission of the playoff games they'd have an out of town scoreboard and take you to another game, where they'd either show a highlight, or the final two minutes of a close game, or something like that. It boggles my mind how the Sega Genesis could support in-game highlights from games around the league, but we can't get them in any games today.”

This primarily applies in principle to the NHL games but even a title like Madden could give this a shot. While it’s not completely necessary to include the highlights from the other games around the league (though it would be nice), the scoreboard showing scores from other games would be a great re-addition. It’s such a simple and hardly noticeable detail that many wouldn’t even notice it, but those that do will be highly amused to see scores from around the league, like the Detroit Lions getting crushed in the first half by the New York Giants.