Out of the Park Baseball 9 Review

[RaychelSnr]

We have just posted our review of Out of the Park Baseball 9.

Quote:

"My first several years playing career baseball sims were spent heavily invested in Baseball Mogul. However, at some point, I developed a desire for a game that was deeper and more feature-laden. For my personal gaming tastes now, Out Of The Park Baseball has become the go-to option -- and the latest entry in the series, OOTP9, has taken up a good bit of my gaming time lately."

[elprez98]

Good job, Sk..Ben.

[rudeworld]

why cant we have some of these features in our counsel sports games?

[myghty]

Good Read! I used to be a big fan of OOTP back in the days, maybe I'll give it a try again.

[Ben E Lou]

Quote: Originally Posted by rudeworld

why cant we have some of these features in our counsel sports games?

Honestly, I think the reason is that it's not cost-effective for the makers of the games to focus on the under-the-hood stuff. Text-based games like OOTP9 have *much* longer gaming life cycles than console games. For example. there's an OOTP online league that has been running continuously for *nine years* realtime. To get that kind of audience, text-based games have to focus heavily on long-term roster building and maintaining, realistic player development, and that sort of thing. Console games tend to get played for a while in-season, then dropped when the brand new version comes out. And my impression is that most console gamers are played one game at a time. When I play OOTP, I can rip through 2 or 3 seasons in a couple of hours. It may take an hour or two to play just one game on a console. So if that game has at best a life cycle of 12 months, there's just not the major concern about what the league's talent level and contract structure looks like 30 seasons from now. With a text-based sim where many people play quickly, that sort of thing is EVERYTHING.

[mrnickyb]

Strat-O-Matic baseball is constantly undervalued and ignored in this genre. It is the most realistic sim baseball on the market. I am replaying the 1998 season and it is ultra-realistic.

[Ben E Lou]

It depends on how you define the genre. I played Strat-O-Matic and other games like it that only allowed one-season play until 1997, when Baseball Mogul was released. Strat does not have career play, which makes it utter and completely useless to me. The defining role of the text sim genre is, in my not-so-humble opinion, the ability to run a franchise as a GM. Drafting and developing players, accurate career arcs, good contract management, and planning for the next generation of superstars are the things that draw me to sports gaming. Titles like OOTP, Front Office Football, PureSim and Baseball Mogul offer those options, while it's something that's 100% lacking in Strat. The day that Mogul was released was literally the day I stopped playing Strat.

[agonytheclown]

The reason console game makers won't create a game with this much depth in the sim aspects is because game buyers wouldn't be a worthy ROI. You'd be buying a game every couple of years, if even that. There isn't much logic to the crap that gamers buy a new game each year because it takes so long to get through a season. There are a miriad of ways to make sports games that allow the user to define his or her own playing experience. Want to play every game? Go ahead! Want to play the first game of each week? Be my guest! Game makers just aren't ever going to make the 'perfect' game like this because that would mean to an end to the revenue stream.