Game Stooge

PREVIEW: Out of the Park Baseball 2007

• Scribbled on March 10th, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Mac, PC, Previews, Simulations, Sports

Ever since consoles took over, and companies started doing exclusivity deals with various sports leagues, it’s been a virtual wasteland for sports gaming. On PCs, it’s even worse - the only options you have are EA Sports titles, and nothing for baseball save MVP Baseball 2005 or, for many purists, High Heat Baseball 2002. That is, only if you count graphical, gamepad-driven baseball.

For years, Out of the Park Baseball has dominated the text-simulation market of baseball, piling stats upon stats upon stats in its simulation. Out of the Park Baseball 6.5 was the pinnacle of of baseball sims. It created a whole new world for gamers, letting them control nearly every aspect of the game while allowing for massive customization.

When OOTP joined forces with SI Games, who are best known for the uber-soccer simulation Championship Manager series, it seemed like a dream come true, because CM  was not only about soccer (or football everywhere else) - it was about the world, the press and personalities. It was about living in the soccer world, and dealing with all sorts of extraneous things off the field. OOTP6.5 dealt with it in a semi-superficial manner, allowing you to meet a wife, have kids (who would actually enter the baseball world themselves), but it was shallow. Inside the Park Baseball was an interesting but unsuccessful attempt at a baseball RPG.

However, Out of the Park 2006, the result of the OOTP/CM merger was more or less broken. The AI was all over the place in the game, and it was just an utter mess. While the underlying gameplay was the same, sound OOTP all knew, it was just not meshing well with the CM engine. OOTP 2007 attempts to fix that.

At first, as with the previous game, the sheer amount of data is overwhelming. You have a ton of information at your perusal, and one can drown in the numbers. Fortunately, a lot of the numbers, while informative, are not salient to your team, and the game tells you everything you need to know. Breaking news, trade offers, and so forth are displayed in an easy fashion. Furthermore, you are given a ton of leeway on what you want to directly control and what you want to entrust to your underlings.

If you choose not to manage every game - and many people won’t manage any games, preferring to remain strictly a general manager - you can assign depth charts, how often (if ever) backups play, and so forth. You can micromanage every single decision or assign a helper to do it for you. Managing games are engaging and fun.

OOTP 2007 is the King of Customization as well. The game ships without real players or real teams, but that is easily amended. It’s fully compatible with Sean Lahman’s famed baseball zip file, which includes every single stat since baseball began, and uploading the file is as easy as directing the game to where the file resides in your hard drive. You can choose to play any year in baseball history, and even go year-by-year in some alternate universe where rookies are drafted elsewhere. What if the Cardinals drafted Mickey Mantle? Or the Yankees drafted Jackie Robinson? If you have the hard drive space, you can download it all, with every single year archived in your league file, so when you look at the Yankees, you can see every lineup they had since 1903 in game, with World Series tallied. If you don’t like real life, you can easily just play a fictional league with fictional players and create your own history. Whatever you do, there will be enough stats to choke several horses.

Furthermore, you can upload each team’s logos, caps and insignias. You can now have faces to go with the players, and the real kicker - the patented face technology actually reflects the player’s aging as the years pass! You can even edit the game’s report text.

OOTP has such loyal fans, you won’t even need to enter the data yourself. As sure as shootin’, a week later there will be tons of league files and styles to choose from. You will find accurate stats and ratings (as well as league modifiers) to allow players to genuinely play, for example, Dead Ball era teams.

And that isn’t even scratching the surface when you consider you can now include every single league in the world (Japanese, Korean, Cuban, Venezuelan, Taiwanese, you name it)- and have them all playing at once. Even more astounding - you can have an online league with a player for each team, all able to play each other in games. Talk about baseball overload.

The only barrier will be the game’s engine. All of the above is meaningless if the game doesn’t play right, trade right, or act right. If you have insane deals every ten days, or bad stat simulation, the entire game will collapse like a badly built house with a frame but no support.

So far, after a few hours or toying around with the late build of the game, it seems very promising. A few years ago, when reviewing Out of the Park Baseball 4, I commented it would be hard to see how Markus Heinsohn (the lead developer) and company could possibly exceed that game. OOTP4 seems like it was made by cavemen in comparison to the coming OOTP 2007. One shudders to think of what the future will bring.

(And hey, Mac owners - this game will be released for Apple computers, too!)

Official Site: Out of the Park Baseball