Game Stooge

REVIEW: Out of the Park Baseball 2007

• Scribbled on April 8th, 2007 by Jonah Falcon
• Filed in Mac, PC, Reviews, Sports

The land of PC sports gaming is pretty barren. Either a sport is nearly absent (baseball) or dominated by EA Sports (everything else). In fact, the only action baseball game available to gamers on the PC is MVP Baseball 2005, which is kept alive by patches and roster updates, but is still relatively primitive when compared to a console game like MLB 2K7.

Fortunately, the field of non-graphic-based baseball strategy/simulations is alive and well, with a bunch of titles to choose from like Baseball Mogul 2008, Dynasty League Baseball, and PureSim Baseball, to name a few. The leader of the pack, however, is the long running Out of the Park Baseball (OOTP) series, which began its humble existance in 1999 and slowly became beefier and beefier. The current incarnation is Out of the Park Baseball 2007 (OOTP 2007), the second version published by SI Games, using the Football Manager framework.

The strengths of the series have always been two things: customization and statistics. The game is wildly customizable, allowing a user to do everything from edit leagues and eras (from the Dead Ball era to the Juiced Ball era), to graphics and presentation (a ton of users, including this reviewer, have already submitted uniforms and team logos by the bushel), to online league play. You can create multiple leagues in every country; do you want to have the Japanese Professional League playing alongside the Major Leagues? Go ahead. The game even allows you to edit game recaps, the names of awards, the player nicknames and city size and team popularity.

Statistic-wise, the game can almost drown you in stats. If you choose the full statistical tracking option, you’ll be fed WHIP and VORP til you pass out. The game can, if you want, record every single player who ever touched a baseball in the minor leagues. You can, of course, place limits - but even just running a regular major league with a full minor leagues will end up with a gigabyte-sized save file. You can even use Sean Lahman’s historical baseball files and run historical leagues, even in a career franchise mode; you can even import, say, the 2006 season, and download every single player who played and their stats as mere background for the retired baseball player file and each team’s history!

The player can also choose how in-depth to make the game, choosing to include or exclude coaches and scouts, or how deep the financial portion of the game is; want a Rule V draft? want a salary cap? want the current CBA featuring options and 40 man rosters? Have at it. Don’t want them? Go ahead and turn them off. If you only want to run the MLB club and let the minors be handled by the computer for you, you can. If you want to let the computer handle everything but the rosters and lineups, it’s your call. OOTP 2007 allows you to choose what game you want to play.

The player can also choose what scope they wish to play in. One can manage each and every game, or just simulate season after season, or a mixture of both. The in-game play is fairly involving - if slightly simplified - and again, the games are customizable. If you want to require pitcher warm-ups, you can. If you want to skip the first few innings, and simulate the game til, say, the 7th, it’s your choice.

The game’s career mode also allows a player, if he or she chooses, to adopt the role of a manager working their way up through the minors. Of course, if the player just wants to plop into the role of a major league manager/GM untouchable by the owner, that’s their prerogative, too. The player career arc is also spot-on, as players can go from a promising rookie to an All-Star in his prime to a washed up player - or be a 5 star prospect and flop miserably, or get cut down in their prime by a dreaded career-ending injury. The trade AI also seems strong, though when using real major league players, sometimes you get “batshit crazy” trades, though it could be simply a result of “garbage in, garbage out”, since the game will blindly assign non-baseball related values to players such as Leadership and loyalty when using the Lahman file - and these stats are important. If you trade or even let an extremely popular player leave, your fans will be outraged and show their displeasure by staying away from the ballpark - though if you trade a popular player for a popular player, it’s, of course, mitigated.

Even fictional players in a franchise become endearing, which is what you’d have eventually after decades anyway even with a real-names league. It’s surprising how you’ll sometimes do unwise business decisions, such as keep a veteran who’s got little to offer but can still somewhat produce, simply because you’ve become fond of that player.

The graphics are functional, but there is one innovatve feature: FaceGen. If you choose to use it, FaceGen creates player avatars for every player in the league, and they actually change according to the player’s state. When young players grow older, the FaceGen will reflect that. If a player gains a lot of weight, the picture will start to show a double chin and chubby cheeks. If a player is angry or happy, the picture will reflect that as well. It adds nothing to the game in terms of gameplay, but it does make a player seem more “real”. If one chooses, they can use static pictures of real players, or nothing at all. Unfortunately, one cannot create a FaceGen from scratch - only click to cycle through random players if a gamer wants, say, Derek Jeter, til a face comes up that’s close enough to the real Jeter’s image.

The game is not without its problems, though. One of the problems is due to its scope; new players can become simply overwhelmed by the wealth of options at first; it takes a day or three to realize that the screens you most have to pay attention to are 1) the news screen and 2) the transaction screen. Everything else is just window dressing from a gameplay standpoint. The game’s size also makes it a real memory hog that is also somewhat fragile. The game was released with a host of bug and glitches that have been mostly dealt with since by a patch. The game still has some idiosyncrasies, such as crashing after save-and-quitting, or writing corrupt faces.dat files. Fortunately, the community and developers have a strong relationship, and issues are always being worked on, as well as community suggestions.

The game is available via download for both PC and Mac.

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