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snoopy369
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Of the Peanuts Gallery
Apr 2004
time: 23:25
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Just started really playing it today, anyone else play PC baseball games?
Sadly this is the only one out at the moment (that I can find, anyway, at my nearest game store)... and has the usual EA bugs  Lousy tags, absurd outfield range, a poor pitcher 'stamina' system, and ... new this year, yet another gimmick in the hitting department that you can't realistically take advantage of unless you play quite a lot - the "hitter's eye" system.
Blah. Color of the ball right after the pitch shows you what sort of pitch it is - for about a half second, and generally not in time to make much of an adjustment anyway. An excuse for them to simplify their pitcher graphics and drastically shorten the distance from the mound to home plate - already one of my gripes last year.
Can't they just make a game where the pitch speed and batter recognition times are realistic for a PC? A major league batter can tell by the position of the pitcher's arm and by the position of his hand as the ball leaves it what sort of pitch it is - so why can't a baseball sim do that?
Heck, why hasn't anyone recently tried a 1st person baseball sim (rather than third person)? That's a lot of the problem - 3rd person POV means you can't see the angle of the arm as the ball leaves it, so you can't tell realistically where the ball is going to go. I thought MVP was *supposed* to be a 1st person game, when I first saw commercials for it - but no, all third person, no decent realism. Just showy graphics and poor gameplay ... heck, my catcher in the game i just played tried to tag someone out by putting his glove in the middle of home plate. Now tell me how that's going to stop a batter from tagging the *edge* of home plate? Really?
And then there's the rosters ... How hard is it to fix the rosters a week before it ships? The rosters were accurate to 1/11/05, which is two *months* before it shipped, unless the retailers held it in their back rooms for a month. (Yes, they ship ahead of the release date, but if the industry requires two extra months, there are serious industry problems.) Sammy Sosa was still on the Cubs, and a whole host of free agents - headlined by Carlos Delgado - were unsigned. Either release it with good rosters, or with an updated roster available to download on release day! (EA never does a good job with rosters, so I shouldn't be surprised, but I never understand why - it couldn't cost them as a company more than $500 *total* to make an updated roster and put it on the webpage for download.)
Blah. Anyway, anyone else have thoughts? 
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17-03-2005 00:06
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