Keeping a Close Watch

I played a ton of baseball over the weekend, grabbing footage and reporting on all 14 playoff games for our feature story, 2004 Simulated World Series. Actually, that isn't entirely correct. More accurately, I watched a ton of baseball games being played this weekend, while I dutifully took notes and recorded periodic footage. By 2 a.m. Saturday morning, bleary-eyed and groggy, I was so inundated with baseball facts and figures that I was dreaming of Jon Miller's voice when I finally hit the sack. You should see the "reporter's notebook" I used to keep track of the games; what started as a fairly organized score sheet, detailing an out-by-out report of each game (using a modified scoring system I created on the fly), ended up as a series of hastily scrawled notes more akin to archaic symbols used in ancient Celtic ritual sacrifices.

Simply watching a sports game for a prolonged period of time, without having any sort of interactivity with it beyond reporting on the happenings, you become aware of obvious flaws that often turn out to have huge consequences in game outcomes, as well as niggling details that may not have been apparent to you when actually playing the game.

Case in point: MVP Baseball 2004's triple bug. I saw several potential singles or doubles turn into stand-up triples because of the outfielder's inability to navigate near the centerfield wall in Fenway Park when a ball was hit in their direction. I watched in horror as tiny little Jim Edmonds or Johnny Damon would simply be standing there, pumping their legs furiously without moving an inch closer to the ball, sitting there at the warning track. Because of this bug, it was up to the left fielder to come in and pick up the assist, turning a close double into an easy triple, and often extra RBIs for the batter. During the MVP series, I saw this happen at least twice. Had this problem been eliminated, the Sox very well could have taken both simulated World Series.

From a graphical standpoint, the differences in player models between EA's game and Sega's ESPN Major League Baseball, is astonishing. The players in MVP are instantly recognizable; the contours of their faces are convincingly rendered, while ESPN's player models seem stiff in comparison, and the less said about their seemingly pasted-on faces the better.

One more bite-sized player model morsel for thought: Are baseball developers going to have to bring in hair modeling experts this year in order to accurately model Johnny Damon's ill-advised Captain Caveman look?

If ESPN Major League Baseball doesn't look as good as EA's game, the same can't be said for its sound. The commentary in Sega's title is outstanding, utilizing the considerable talents of ESPN play-by-play man Jon Miller to full effect. The quality of the calls are excellent both in their execution and in their flow; you'll hear Miller talk about back-to-back strike pitches in context of one another, not simply as a series of individual comments streamed one after the other. It's a small but very effective difference that adds to the "ESPN broadcast" illusion the game's developers are striving for.

Finally, I'll leave you with one purely selfish plea for next year's baseball titles. While I appreciate the attention to detail found in both games' pitching animations, is there any way to speed up the wait time between pitches? Even a simple "hurry up" button would be greatly appreciated. My God, I felt my already thin grasp on sanity cracking at the seams while waiting between pitches during some of the simulated games. Sure, five to eight seconds may not seem like a lot to you. But fourteen simulated games later--several of which went into extra innings--and these wait times began to feel like tightly compacted eternities to me.