Frankengaiden

Posted by Steve on April 9 2004: New comic here. It describes a real problem I'm having trying to find a good baseball game. Let's go over the candidates, shall we?

All-Star Baseball. I gotta say, this one started with a lot of promise. It does a lot of things right. While they're not perfect, a lot of the little quirks with each stadium are captured. Not even just the apple at Shea or the Train at the Juice Box, but things like visitor home runs at Wrigley being thrown back on the field. Of course, they didn't get everything, like the scoreboard at The Cell, but nobody's perfect. Plus there's some nice collision detection on the stadiums, meaning that if you hit a ball off the upper deck facade, it'll actually bounce off it and fall back to the field. Again, a nice little touch.

The best thing ASB has going for it though is it's franchise mode, which just might be the best in the business. The trade system seemed pretty good. You can get good players, but the cpu won't give 'em away. (It's hard to really evaluate a game's trade logic without spending a ton of time on it, so don't quote me on this.) Although you do have the option to override rejected trades if you feel like being a dirty cheater. There's also a trading block that's the best I've ever seen. You can put a player on the block, set the requirements for what you're looking for based on several categories (pitching/hitting, veteran/rookie, cheap/expensive, I think that's it, but I don't remember for sure) and then, best of all, get immediate results, instead of having to let days and weeks pass like most games. And newly signed players aren't tradeable until after a specific date, (I think it's sometime in June, but don't quote me) so no signing high rated free agents and then trading them off for young talent. But the best part is that players with ten and five status, (ten years in the league, five with the same team) who have veto power on all trades in the MLB, have that power in the game too. So if, for example, you try to get Bernie Williams away from the Yankees and ship him off to the White Sox, he'll promptly tell you to go fuck off. Well, maybe not literally, but you get the idea. This too, however, can be overridden if you choose. Basically, if it's a real MLB rule, it's in here. You'll even go to arbitration with your players. How cool is that?

Unfortunately, all this good stuff comes to a screeching halt when you actually play the games. First, there's no gameplay sliders, which as far as I'm concerned shouldn't even be considered a feature anymore in sports games. They should be as standard as a two player mode. There's three different hitting modes (2-D cursor, 3-D cursor, and zone) but none of them really felt right. Baserunning is an enormous pain in the ass, which often leads you running yourself out of a big inning cause you cant get one guy to advance and the other guy to stay on base. The new "fielder cam" which is supposed to put give you a "right on the field" feel, is clumsy and poorly done, giving you to little time to orient yourself and find the ball. To be fair, you can switch to a more traditional camera angle, but it often seems to take too long to get your controlled fielder into focus, making chasing down balls hit to the gaps a real chore. And maybe it's just me, but the pitching seems pretty weak too. The computer seems to just lock down after two strikes, and getting bad hitters to chase strike three out of the zone seems waaaaaay harder than it should be. Also, there's some weird bugs/quirks too. Sometimes the cpu will challenge for an extra base, you'll get the ball to the proper infielder in plenty of time, only to have him inexplicably hold the ball and not tag the runner. I've also seen reports of batters being flat out unable to swing while they're at bat, though I admit I didn't see it myself. There are a few things done right, the cpu is aggressive on the base paths, you'll get a balk called on you if you try to throw a pickoff too late in your delivery, and Xbox users can have player specific custom soundtracks (so you can have it so that "Seek and Destroy" plays whenever your closer comes out of the bullpen) but overall the gameplay is more work than fun.

So basically, if you're the type that has more fun building and maintaining a team and then simming through seasons than actually playing games, this is the game for you.

Whew! That's a lot of typing for one game. Why don't we take a break and read Bob's post, then I'll go over MVP, ok? Be right back.

Posted by Bob on April 9, 2004: Hey gang. No new site news this week other than I'm up to the first ten comics with new commentary on 'em. I'll eventually get to all of 'em; at least that's the plan. Don't hold me to that or expect any sort of time estimate...Cause I just don't know.

In other news JESUS TAPDANCING CHRIST! I'm fine with peircing. I'm cool with tattoos. But if you are gonna implant something in my EYE, I'm just gonna have to kick you over and over in the head. I hate it when there's an eyelash in my eye. When I wear contacts, I have trouble getting the drops in without spilling em all over my face. And don't even get me started on the glaucoma "blast of air to the eye" test. Just thinking about it makes my eyes water. Gah. No thank you sister.

If you're anything like me, you're six feet tall and named Bob.

If you're anything else like me, you enjoy videos of stupid people hurting themselves or destroying their property. Well, here's one with both. I don't have to come up with some sort of sensational description to sell this video, because it flat out sells itself. That's right.

I've been really into zombies lately, so, in the spirit of zombies, here's Iggy Pop. He looks even more dead than the zombies in the video. Still, the man could kick my ass at 90 or whatever he happens to be, and I'm only 21. Kinda scary.

"There are worse things out tonight than vampires." "Like what?" "Like me." Seriously, that's crazy. I'd feel sorry for anyone who happened to have moderately pointed canine teeth in that neighborhood. And, since I can't come up with anything more about that story, I'm just gonna lay another quote from Blade on ya, just cause I love it so. "Some motherfuckers always trying to ice skate uphill." Word.

And since I can't think of anything to top good ol' Wesley Snipes, I'm gonna call it here. Back in seven.

Posted by Steve on April 9 2004: Now that he's done blabbing about whatever the hell he talked about (I don't actually have his newspost as of the time I'm writing this. I don't even know if he really did one at this point.) let's talk about MVP Baseball.

If you listen to all the reviews, you'd think this game was programmed by Jesus or something. Everyone's all "game of the year" this and "best baseball game since baseball itself" and shit. It does have a lot of positives, most of them in the gameplay department. The pitching system, which is a lot like the old three click system you've seen in a ton of golf games, really is a lot of fun to use. It really lets you feel the difference between pitching with a future hall of famer versus pitching with a human gas can. There's also a meter system for throws made in the field, with harder throws (meter in the red) are balanced out by a bigger chance of a bad throw. Hitting is decent, but nothing spectacular. Baserunning is pretty well done. You select a runner to control with the buttons, (on the Xbox version, B for runner on first, Y for runner on second, etc.) and then move him along with the control pad. The best part of all though is, strange as this is going to sound, the sliding. You using the right analog stick, you can not only control whether you slide head first or feet first, you can also control whether you slide to the right or left of the bag, which can make a big difference when trying to avoid the tag on a close play. And if you slide, the dirt stays on the uniform, so the next time the player comes to bat after a head first slide to second, he'll still have dirt on the front of his uniform. Nice touch.

The crowds are about the best I've heard in a video game. They'll cheer when you score a run, and boo when you start giving up runs. They'll chant specific things for certain players. (My personal favorite is the crowd at The Cell chanting "Oh-ee-oh, Maaaaaaglio" for Ordonez.) If Pedro is shutting down the Yankees at Fenway, the crowd will start chanting "O-ver-rat-ed" when they come to bat. Overall, gameplay is really a lot of fun, with my only beef being that right handed hitters are obscenely overpowered. (I've had pitchers have multi-homer games at the plate) And the double play animation take forever. Oh, and the fact that the cpu never steals. I've see it once, in about 30 games.

Unfortunately, all is not well, with most of the problems being with the much hyped "120 year dynasty mode". You get control of your team and their AA and AAA minor league teams. This sounds cool at first, but since most of the minor leaguers are fictious names, and there's only a few generic minor league stadiums, actually playing a minor league game is only fun once or twice. After that, it's just too more teams full of injuries and bad chemistry. Another major annoyance is the player happiness thing. Basically, players have an individual rating of how happy they are based on things like pay, playing time, etc. The only problem is that your players are a bunch of fucking women. They're emotional little babies who turn unhappy at the drop of a hat. This one is pissed cause he's not playing enough. That one's pissed cause he's playing too much. This one's pissed because he's not getting playing time, even though the reason he missed playing time is because he was injured. Most annoying of all are the ones who are unhappy because they don't feel they're being paid enough. First of all, damn near every fucking player in this game feel they're underpaid. Even players who just signed their fuckin contracts this offseason. It's just ridiculous. You basically feel like you're managing a bunch of goddamn little leaguers.

But the true gem, the "don't you fuckers beta test" award winner, is the player progression. Noted on many forums and pretty much no reviews, cpu generated players generally don't progress worth a shit. So after the first season, the cpu generates a bunch of players for the draft. None of those players will progress to anything but average (at best) players. So once the real players retire, you get stats like 12 for the home run leader, .250 for the batting champ, etc. There's apparently a home made fix for the PC version (and for those with a modded Xbox) but the rest of us are out of luck. If you want to dig into this more, check out the forums at Operation Sports (registration required to read that one though) or this page, and here's a link to a patch, though I haven't used it, so use it at your own risk.

So basically, MVP is fun to play some exhibition games with, but the dynasty mode is just worthless. See my problem? I need ASB's franchise mode and MVP's gameplay, and I'd be set. My last hope though is ESPN Major League Baseball, which I haven't gotten a chance to really get into yet. I'll have more to say about it next week. But for now, I've been typing this goddamn thing all night, so I'm gonna finish the update already. See you next week.