First the basics: EA Sport's MVP Baseball 2005 allows you to play as a manager, owner, and god over any major league, AAA, AA, and/or A league baseball team (well, the top A league teams anyway), holding nearly all of the real players from all the major league teams, plus anyone who has ever played in the majors is also represented. You control your batters and pitchers and try to guide them to a World Series victory......When I took this out of the box to play it for the first time, the first impressions were very strong....the graphics looked good, the game seemed to play well....however, weird plays started happening, and also while there are a lot of stats, many are missing, like averages with runners in scoring position (which to me is very important to know). The interface is also non-intuitive, having to figure out when to use the keyboard and when to use the controller took a little time to get used to...and the baserunning controls, while effective when finally learned, caused many an out by mistake.....getting further into the game, SIMPLY PUT, AS A USER PITCHER, I DIDN'T THROW ENOUGH WALKS, and I had to use mods and mod a little bit on my own, to get a semblance of true simulation...not throwing enough walks actually kind of ruined the game because everything else was skewed....then finally, it just seemed like things were actually too scripted....using the left analog to try to control where the ball went (with the hitter) more often than not does not work, and occasionally I would hit home runs that I could think of no way how I could have based on where the pitch was and where my left analog stick was pointing (down), AND/OR I would be pitching to a batter's "cold" zone and he would then pop it out of the park....I mean these things do happen every now and then in real life, but it feels like the CPU is just too "clutch" in deciding a games outcome...not to mention the weird things like odd errors / non-errors that occurred, strange throwing, fielding decisions (which do happen in real life, but not the way they happened in MVP 05), etc........in conclusion, this was fun while it lasted, but in the end MVP 05 still leaves me wanting for better gameplay, a better job by the developers of how baseball works, and a better tested product. One final note, I STRONGLY RECOMMEND checking out mvpmods.com as there are a lot of folks doing great things by modding this game and making it more playable.
note: the score deserves better than I've given it, its only that way because of the really really bad sound score. so think of the score as closer to 9.5 So I just thought, eh what the heck...I'll pick up this baseba... Read Full Review
Wow, I was given 120 characters to write a snazzy buzz line and I used all 120 (with the period). But onto MVP Baseball 2005. Basically MVP 2005 is a maddening collection of great ideas and terrible ideas. Almost ev... Read Full Review
