I don’t consider myself much of a gamer. I am not very good at Role playing games, and I quickly learn to fail at online first-person-shooters. However…one gaming genre I am an expert on is Sports games. Particularly baseball games, and Madden. I’ll blog about Madden some other time, but for now I will go into the history of my baseball-gaming experiences. I’ll also preview MLB 08: The Show and MLB 2K8, which both come out a week from Tuesday (I have already scheduled the day off of work).

I first started baseball-gaming on the Original NES with Bad News Baseball, Baseball Stars, RBI Baseball, and Bases Loaded.

Of these, the gameplay was definitly the best on Bad News Baseball, but Baseball Stars had the makings of the first Franchise mode (more on this later), where you could fire/hire players, and create your own team to play throughout a schedule. The game was equipped with a memory pack to allow for game saves.

Another fun game, which I have been saying someone should re-make for years, was Little League Baseball.

The premise of the game was, you take control of any country’s national little league team, and participate in the little league world series. The gameplay was excellent, and the game was very very very tough. The graphics werent too bad either.

  Baseball Stars

Later, as we moved onto the next generation, Sega Genesis, we saw the emergence of ACTUAL stadiums and almost photo-realistic graphics. Everyone thought this was a miracle, however it was only the pitcher-batter interface that looked like this. World Series Baseball was the first game to put hitting in the perspective of the catcher’s camera, to show off the stadiums.

Then, as I progressed to the next generation of Sega…the Saturn, I found perhaps my most favorite baseball game of all-time, World Series Baseball ‘98.

World Series Baseball 98 was the first game that I know of, to feature almost every signature pitching motion and batting stance in the major leagues. Certainly every big-name player in the game had their own unique motions. Though the player models looked terrible, the batting engine was unique, and featured a guess-pitch which was quite rewarding.

The hitter would guess where the pitch would be…one of 8 quadrants in the strike zone. If you guessed the correct zone where the pitch would end up, the cursor would lock on and it would be easy to make contact (though hit quality was dependant on timing), but if you guessed wrong, a manual cursor would pop up in the strikezone, and you would have to locate it over the pitched ball as it was coming in….making it very difficult to react in time on hard-throwing pitchers. Very realistic.

After that, I picked up a Playstation…where I had fun with games like 3D Baseball (which used in-game stat overlays for franchise mode—such as “Cecil Fielder is currently 4th in the Majors with 13 Home runs—this was an excellent game.) 3D Baseball had excellent audio as well, and was one of the most underrated baseball games ever. The lack of the MLB License though, meant no real team names or stadiums, only the MLBPA license for player names.

Later was MLB 97 by SCEA…..this would feature excellent animations and audio, and the series would eventually become MLB The Show in 2006.

Moving forward to Playstation 2 (because there were really no good N64 Baseball titles)… All Star Baseball from Acclaim brought the deepest franchise mode in the history of baseball games. Small things, such as player arbitration and the Rule 5 draft were implemented. The gameplay was ok. It was realistic but the player models were all very similar and moved too robotically. The commentary was also exceptionally dry and awful.

Next, the once great Triple Play series was canned, and became MVP Baseball. I first got this game in 2003 for XBox, and it featured a brand new meter-pitching system, which would not only control pitch speed but would affect the accuracy of the pitch and the pitcher’s stamina. The hitting system allowed for true physics, and forced players to try and hit like an actual baseball player, instead of swinging for homeruns all the time.

MVP Baseball 2005, the 3rd and final iteration of the series, was/is considered by most hardcore gamers to be the greatest baseball game ever made. The game featured an Owner Mode in which you controlled all of the players throughout your entire system (A, AA, AAA, Majors) for the first time. Also, real player salaries and a realistic monetary system. You would build your own stadium, charge ticket prices, concession stand prices, and negotiate player salaries….try and make money and win at the same time, I dare you. BEST GAME EVER.

After seeing this, 2k sports swooped in and bought the third-party developer rights to Major League Baseball, thus killing the MVP franchise. Unfortunately 2k sports had yet to put out a revolutionary baseball game….in fact, most of their games pretty much sucked.

MLB 2K6, their first solo effort, and the first baseball game on Xbox 360, was one of the worst games ever made. Xbox graphics, Xbox animations, Original Nintendo Audio sounds, and The most boring commentary in the history of mankind.

MLB 2K7, however, may have been on of the best looking sports games ever made.

And while MLB 2K7 addressed a lot of the MLB 2K6 problems, it was still a flawed game with too many homeruns, and pitching that was incredibly easy. Here is a look at a box score from a game I played within 1 week of buying the game, on the hardest difficulty:

Yes, I won 21-0, threw a perfect game, and had 18 strikeouts.

The graphics were indeed beautiful though, and bringing in the executive producer of MVP 2005 to become the E.P. of MLB 2K7, 2K8, 2K9, certainly has the game moving in the right direction. More on MLB 2K8 later.

MLB 07 the show was the first iteration of the popular PS2 game. Mlb 07 features a great presentation, and the best audio commentary in the history of video games. Not just sports…but all games. The physics were excellent, and the franchise mode was deep and somewhat challenging (yet buggy). The graphics werent up to par with MLB 2K7, however.

Players lacked self shadowing…the game lacked dynamic lighting, and homeruns/foul balls lacked collision detection with the environment around the field.

Those things have been fixed for MLB 08 the Show:

MLB 08 the show features some of the best player faces in gaming. The crowd interaction is there too, with fans reaching for foul balls, chanting, giving standing ovations, and even batting around beach balls (which occasionally make it onto the field).

MLB 08 also features a robust create-a-player feature, which borrows a system from EA’s Tiger Woods golf and Fightnight, were almost every aspect of a player’s head is editable. Maybe next year some sort of camera compatibility will be added?

Packed with all of the same great gameplay and presentation, MLB 08 appears to be the front-runner in this year’s baseball war…however it is only available to PS3 owners, as the 3rd party license agreement still belongs to 2k sports.

Speaking of 2k Sports, they have added to their 2k7 titlle by adding the following:

An innovative new pitching system–designed for hardcore gamers like myself, in which throwing a pitch requires you to actually mimic the pitch spin that a real pitcher would use.

Fully playable minor leagues — -A, AA, and AAA teams and uniforms (and 20 minor league stadiums… a first for MLB gaming)

New batting and throwing mechanics and physics.

Unfortunately, early gameplay footage and reviews have shown that not much was done to the somewhat subdued crowd atmosphere and same-old boring audio.

Perhaps in 2k9, it will shine.

My beloved cat, Melky, who would have been two years old in April, died this morning.

I woke up as I always do.  I took a shower, put food in the bowl, and then went to my computer.   I scooped the litter box, and suddenly I realized I hadnt seen Melky yet.

I walked out into the living room, and in the corner, I saw him curled up.   He looked like he was asleep…I reached over to wake him, but he didnt move.   So I tried to lift his head, and I noticed he was stiff.     His claws had dug themselves into the carpet, and his tongue was hanging out of his mouth, with his teeth clenched on it.    It was the most horrible thing I have ever seen.

I havnt cried in years.  I cried a little when I found out my uncle was going to die in early 2006.

Today I bawled.  Melky will not be forgotten.

He used to wait by the door for me to come home.   He used to bask in the sun, and lay on his back in the cute way that only some cats do.   He would sit and watch tv with me, or if I was playing video games, he would crawl up and lay down next to me and sleep against my leg.

He would sit on the corner of the bathtub while I took a bath, as he did last night.   Minutes after I would lay down in bed, I would feel the thump of him jumping into bed with me….as he did last night.

Last night I petted and scratched his head a little more than usual, because he was being extra friendly and purring extra loud.   He seemed extra happy.   Maybe he knew that when my eyes closed, that I would be saying goodbye and goodnight to him for the last time.

Or maybe he was just being a cat.  Happy to be in a warm bed with an owner who loved him dearly.  I’ll miss you little buddy.