Simmed seven seasons so far and things look very, very good. I re-imported the OOTP 6.5 league file, zeroed out all modifiers to default (1.000) settings, and added our $90 million salary cap. We just might be able to look at more detailed issues like team markets, ticket prices, and other issues by tomorrow. I’ll continue with a 20 season sim overnight.
We may finally have a game folks!
The new beta patch was released earlier today. I’m running a ten season sim as I type this – results at some point tomorrow.
Markus “Raging Bull” Heinsohn is still frothing at the mouth over the PC gamer review. I do give Marc Duffy credit for being restrained in his responses (except for the “mad as hell” incident) to criticisms, but I guess that is why he’s a marketeer or whatever Sports Interactive calls such fellows. Mr. Heinsohn seems to lack such social graces and is living in the fantasy land where the initial release of OOTPB 2006 was just fine, although it needed a few tweaks here and there.
Let’s recap the initial release. The AI by even fan boy measures was broken in many areas. Online league play was confusing at best and broken in other areas. Stats were inflated and OOTP 6.5 league imports were missing ratings.
HOWEVER (to borrow the “Raging Bull”‘s forum emphasis), one thing I will agree with that a poster in the OOTPB 2006 forum points out. While SI’s game was reviewed as initial code (or so it seems), Baseball Mogul and Puresim were not (or so it seems). Baseball Mogul was as broken as OOTPB 2006 when it was initially released, so I cannot believe the initial release code received an 81%.
Fair to OOTPB 2006 that BM 2006 (hehe, “BM” always cracks me up) was released in like November last year and had time to patch things? Probably not. HOWEVER, this wouldn’t be a problem if the initial release wasn’t – yes – broken.
My initial reaction seems to be confirmed – the PC Gamer baseball roundup has been sighted by multiple sources. Now, I have not actually seen it yet, but people that I trust are telling me it’s true.
Let me be very clear about something. Low score or not, I am only playing OOTPB 2006. Actually, I am playing OOTP 6.5 much more since none of my leagues are using OOTPB 2006, but I am still playing the latest version. I am NOT playing Baseball Mogul or Puresim. And I would play OOTP 6.5 before I played Baseball Mogul. Puresim is probably more interesting as a solo player game than OOTP 6.5, but I don’t do solo play much these days.
So I do understand some of Markus “Raging Bull” Heinsohn’s disgust with the review process. He is trying to solve a complex mathematics equation while the competition puts forth their nice solution to 1+1 and 2+2. Is it fair that the other developers are answering “2” and “4” while his equation remains unsolved? Yes it is because Mr. Heinsohn (or maybe more accurately Sports Interactive) could have waited until he had a correct answer before releasing the game.
I ran a 20 year sim after importing my online league file under OOTPB 2006’s patch number 2. League averages and ERA are way too high. The same trends I saw before the new patch still are present in the new patch. Averages start low and then balloon after six or seven seasons. There was at least one team that had a .313 team batting average one season. League ERAs above 5.00 were the norm for 12 seasons in the AL.
One of my online owners suggested that we try checking the adjust to historical averages box and see if that doesn’t keep the league average and ERA in line, but I am assuming that left unchecked, the game should produce modern day results. We may have no choice other than to manipulate the settings to get more realistic statistics.
It seems that the whole PC Gamer baseball review roundup may be a hoax. At least one poster in the thread linked below claims that PC Gamer has published no such baseball comparison. Yet another in the long line of weird attacks on OOTB 2006.
I do agree with one poster’s observation that the fact that everyone believed it (the rankings) speaks volumes about the state of the game when it was released…
I went to check the thread I linked in the post below and it seems that things continue to heat up as Markus “Raging Bull” Heinsohn expresses his displeasure with the (I am assuming) rhetorical question:
“So if I code tic-tac-toe I get a score of 100%? Nice”
No you don’t. But if you code tic-tac-toe, add a bunch of features that don’t work very well or have awkward interfaces, you get a 47%. And people will be asking why the hell Heinsohn messed up the perfectly nice game of tic-tac-toe.
This is what I like to call the .400 Software Studios effect. When they were around, they made some very, very nice games…eventually. The release code was horrendous (possible exception being their pro basketball titles), but they were patched up over weeks and months.
Should reviewers give these types of games high scores based on what they could become, or on what they currently are? I am probably in the camp that wants to hold publishers’ feet to the fire and hold them accountable for what they release to the public. There’s too much of this paying beta testing going on and I’m a bit tired of it.
On the other hand, you don’t want to kill a game if there’s hope that the developer will fix it.
Of all the reviewers on the planet, Brett Todd’s opinions probably most closely match my views on most text games. He has a long resume in this genre. He was my sports editor at Games Domain Review (originally a UK site by the way) many years ago and knows Championship Manager, Diamond Mind, and all that good old text gaming stuff. He knows what he is talking about, more than any text-gaming reviewer out there as far as I am concerned.
I am not sure if he actually came up with the 47% score himself, but I certainly understand why it got that score. Maybe he and many others are getting tired of the .400 Software Studios effect.
The good news? Fix the game and OOTPB 2007 will get great scores next year!
For those that missed all of the whoopla, PC Gamer slammed OOTPB 2006 with a 47% score, while scoring Baseball Mogul and Puresim higher. Brett Todd wrote the review comparison and I have to regretfully agree with the score. Let me explain. Many review sites/magazines only take a look at the released product. As is. OOTPB 2006 was not a playable game on many different levels – online play was confusing (broken for some), solo play had very bad AI, and many things simply didn’t work or were coded badly. These are all things that a reviewer like Mr. Todd will jump on and he has consistently over the years been highly critical of games for exactly these same reasons. I actually applaud his objectivity since I know he is a big fan of the series.
Baseball Mogul seems to work and PureSim is more refined, so yes, they deserved higher scores. Heck, even OOTP 6.5 deserved a higher score than OOTPB 2006 based on release code.
On the other hand, reviews like the 9 out of 10 at Operation Sports are nonsense. I don’t think reviews should be based on game potential, but I am not sure if the OS reviewer actually played the game enough to judge that potential anyhow.
So don’t shoot the messenger. If you release a game with the long list of problems that OOTPB 2006 had, this is what you reap from objective reviewers. They will always score bug ridden games low.
Just be happy I don’t review anymore!
I just read Bill Harris’ lengthy discussion about OOTPB 2006. He makes some good points, but comparing OOTPB 2006 in its first (well, not even first yet since it doesn’t quite work) iteration to Football Manager really isn’t a fair comparison. FM has been around a long, long time. It is one of the longest developed text sims in the history of text sims. Heck Eastside Hockey Manager isn’t nearly as good as Football Manager for the same reasons, if we’re keeping score.
Even with that longevity, Football Manager only recently added its 2D match engine. Eastside Hockey Manager doesn’t have this fully functional yet.
Look, there are plenty of people out there like my brother who like Budweiser and Coors Light. It’s their beer, they swear by it, and don’t want to taste anything else. In fact, anything else actually tastes bad or “bitter” to them. Others, like myself, would rather drink water than ever again be forced to drink a Budweiser or Coors Light. The beer we drink is an acquired taste. There will always be folks like me that prefer a nice porter in a tulip glass and there will be people perfectly happy drinking Coors from a “cold sealed” can.
Out of the Park Baseball 2006 is the first badly tasting batch of what could be a fine porter. It doesn’t aspire to be an easy drinking Budweiser. Lots of people out there want it watered down or brewed as something else, but that’s not happening. It is what it is.
But yea, a walkthrough would be nice for the game…
Crap. Out of the Park Baseball 2006 does not work with online leagues after patch #2. The import/export process simply doesn’t work. I continue to marvel at the apparent lack of a beta testing online league somewhere (anywhere) that SI can test these things with. I want to thank part of the online community that is taking it upon itself to test the game before commissioners waste any time trying to get this thing up and running.
It doesn’t help the situation, but you could see this coming a mile away. Sports Interactive knew zero about online leagues before Markus came aboard and does not know how to test their games’ online league functions. That’s a harsh statement, but nothing they’ve done these past weeks leads me to believe otherwise. Yes, the whole zipped league file FTP function is nice, but if you can’t run a league because basic things are broken with the import/export process, who cares?
So when the game finally works, I’ll return to it. I’m not wasting hours of my life setting up leagues only to be frustrated that they can’t work online. My suggestion for people sitting on the fence is that they NOT buy OOTPB 2006 at this point. There are already enough paying beta testers out there, so no sense in adding yourself to the process until a functional product is released.
The good folks at Sports Interactive released the new OOTPB 2006 patch as promised. The patch list of fixes/additions is quite impressive. I was going to ask if all of the naysayers and general loud mouthed forum idiots would start posting apologies after applying the patch. But even if the patch works as advertised, I imagine that group will complain that the game shouldn’t have been released with all of those problems.
I’ll do a re-import and some more analyses this weekend.
For the first time in a long time, I have not preordered the latest, greatest, incarnation of NCAA or Madden football. I just do not see a compelling reason why I should upgrade over NCAA 06 and Madden 05. I have not touched NCAA 06 in months; I sold Madden 06 after I realized that it was just not going to get much play; have not touched Madden 05 since I sold Madden 06.
EA should consider the above a real “ouch,” or at the very least, an “oops.” What happens when those of us with disposable income are no longer enchanted with the latest yearly upgrades? How does EA (and other publishers) make money when those of us that like spending money on videgames become complacent, dare I say indifferent to the traditional bounty of coffin filling football releases? What if I am not alone? I digress.
With all that said, I am considering getting a PSP football game (I sold my PSP version of Madden several month ago), but I am still not convinced that EA is going to improve Madden. My hopes were not encouraged after seeing the following on GameStop’s site (in reference to PSP Madden):
* PSP ExclusivesReturn kicks, avoid tackles, and aim for the High Score in a PSP-exclusive mini-game, or transfer an entire season in Franchise mode back and forth between your PSP and your PlayStation2.
Wow! We get to actually return kicks in a football game. What a crock of crap. Actually, it should say something along the lines of realistic punt returns; I suppose that would be worth something.
If tradition holds true, NCAA will be based on last year’s PSP Madden, which was a so-so game, that I only enjoyed for a short while before moving on to something else. A proper portable NCAA title would be money well spent, but will EA do the game justice?
If it is not obvious by my lack of videogame posts, right now I am finding console gaming a rather blah experience, which may explain my lack of enthusiasm for this year’s crop of football games.
It is always nice to return home, especially after a long business trip. I will not go into the details of work (since some folks from the office actually read my crap), but the trip was very draining. I did get to see some football in an English pub, and I got to try all sorts of beer (that is always the fun part). In Chester I got to run around the old Roman wall, which was great exercise, and extremely entertaining. It is hard to believe that this wall was built 1000+ years ago; nothing like that in Georgia. I also had beer in some extremely old pubs, including a couple that were underground, and once used as Roman barracks.
The not so fun part of the trip was getting sick; very, very sick. I cannot recall ever feel as bad as I did Monday morning at the train station. Not sure if it was a virus or some bad clams from the night before, but the train ride from London to Chester was the trip form hell. I never thought I would make it without hurling all over the place, but thank the good Lord that I did make it in one piece.
I did not get in much gaming, except for a couple of hours on the plane with the PSP. Lumines, Pinball Hall of Fame, and Winning Eleven receive all the action, so noting really new to report.
At any rate, I am glad to be back on US soil!