IceAgeComing
Retired Administrator
- Joined
- May 26, 2013
- Location
- Brussels, Belgium
- Profile Flag
- Scotland
- Online Cricket Games Owned
-
- Don Bradman Cricket 14 - PS3
- Don Bradman Cricket 14 - Steam PC
Baseball. It may not be the best bat and ball sport in the world; but it is the only one to have a truly great management game for it. The Out of the Park Baseball series is the only game of the genre to really challenge Football Manager in terms of how accurately it handles its sport, in terms of depth of gameplay and in terms of replayability - in some ways it goes further, as seen below. It goes far beyond anything that Cricket has; both games, while being quite fun have serious drawbacks which is a huge, huge shame: if there was a game like this for Cricket I'd play the shit out of it, its fab!
You see the best bit of OOTP 18 isn't the great match engine, or the intuitive scouting system or the boatload of useful stats it tracks. Two key features sell me on the game: firstly the ability to play any historical MLB season dating back to 1901 (they claim back to 1871 but before then its a bit dodgy and not at all historical) including the full minor league system from 1915 (when the Texas league, the first thing resembling a modern minor league) was formed and in the new version, the Negro Leagues which contained a large number of great non-white players whose race barred them from the all-white MLB. Secondly, you can create from scratch a Baseball League system from any country you wish and it'll generate large chunks of stuff for you (backed up by an historically accurate financial and player creation system which ensures that the game tracks how the game developed through time): made better in the new game by the addition of international competitions and an automated promotion/relegation system, which helps to make simulating this sort of thing easier.
So that's what I'm doing: starting from 1919 I'm going to load in the historic US leagues; add in fictional leagues from a variety of countries through time (starting with England and Scotland at the moment, more will develop as time goes on) and I'll let the thing run and talk about it. After a few years I might jump into a team that's not doing well and try to lead them through the ranks to the top, but that's not going to be until things settle down a little in the game first. I don't know if this will be particularly interesting to anyone but I'll stick with it for a while and if it gets traction, fab! The next post will be a little bit of historical background, then I'll start with the 1919 season (which is actually already done and was simulated before I actually planned to do this, so things will end up a little vague - I'm actually through to the 1920 Olympic Gold Medal game which inspired me to do this).
You see the best bit of OOTP 18 isn't the great match engine, or the intuitive scouting system or the boatload of useful stats it tracks. Two key features sell me on the game: firstly the ability to play any historical MLB season dating back to 1901 (they claim back to 1871 but before then its a bit dodgy and not at all historical) including the full minor league system from 1915 (when the Texas league, the first thing resembling a modern minor league) was formed and in the new version, the Negro Leagues which contained a large number of great non-white players whose race barred them from the all-white MLB. Secondly, you can create from scratch a Baseball League system from any country you wish and it'll generate large chunks of stuff for you (backed up by an historically accurate financial and player creation system which ensures that the game tracks how the game developed through time): made better in the new game by the addition of international competitions and an automated promotion/relegation system, which helps to make simulating this sort of thing easier.
So that's what I'm doing: starting from 1919 I'm going to load in the historic US leagues; add in fictional leagues from a variety of countries through time (starting with England and Scotland at the moment, more will develop as time goes on) and I'll let the thing run and talk about it. After a few years I might jump into a team that's not doing well and try to lead them through the ranks to the top, but that's not going to be until things settle down a little in the game first. I don't know if this will be particularly interesting to anyone but I'll stick with it for a while and if it gets traction, fab! The next post will be a little bit of historical background, then I'll start with the 1919 season (which is actually already done and was simulated before I actually planned to do this, so things will end up a little vague - I'm actually through to the 1920 Olympic Gold Medal game which inspired me to do this).