MattA75's Full Review: MVP Baseball 2004 for PlayStation 2
I don't normally write video game reviews. For any of my regular readers, you already know this. The reasons behind this are many. For one, my interest in video games has waned immensely since the height of my interest from about 1990-1999. At this point, I basically only play sports titles, with the occasional rental thrown in for a different challenge. I also did not get a PS2 until this past fall, and let's just say the new releases for the original PSX over the past couple of years, especially sports titles, were underwhelming (no EA hockey game after 2001, even though Madden and NBA Live still get yearly releases?).
Perhaps the biggest disappointment over the past few years has been the underwhelming quality of the baseball titles that have been rolled out. Between gamplay options that had bugs on top of bugs, computer opponents that made it boring to play the game within 2 weeks of buying it, and choppy interfaces that weren't so smooth, I have been absolutely disgusted with the state of baseball video games in recent years. I'll never forget playing Triple Play 2000 and hitting 36 home runs with one Jose Offerman over the course of a season. To even call these games "simulations" would be an insult to sports franchises that so often get it right, most notably the Madden football series.
And so, it was with no certain amount of hesitation that I purchased a copy of MVP Baseball 2004 for PS2 back in April shortly after it hit shelves. My brother, who had gotten PS2 about a year earlier than me, had bought the 2003 version and he said he enjoyed it, though there were some bugs that could use fixing. In addition, I had heard that High Heat Baseball, a game that had gotten great reviews for its realism, was not going to be produced this year since its maker, 3DO, had gone out of business. I had been unimpressed with the MLB series from 989 Sports, and had heard some none too kind things about the All Star Baseball series. It only seemed logical to see if EA Sports had gotten any better since making the ridiculous Triple Play games through the early part of this decade.
It's now two months later, and I can safely say I am loving this game. It certainly has its drawbacks, which I'll discuss later, but its positives far outweigh the negatives, especially if you're a basic gamer like myself who just wants to be able to play a decent game of baseball where the box score doesn't look like football games.
Modes of Play
There are varying modes of play, ranging from a simple one time exhibition game for one or two players, to the revamped franchise mode, which lets you take the reigns of a major league franchise for up to 100 seasons. There are also a couple of mini-game features as well. The Home Run Showdown is an updated version of the popular "Home Run Derby" mode that appears in virtually all baseball games nowadays. The refreshing thing about this is that it is a race between two players (either 1P vs. Com or 1P vs 2P) to hit a specific distance in feet. Each foot counts as one point, with a bonus of 100 points for a home run. You subtract 100 for a swing and miss, and you subtract the distance for a foul ball. You are both hitting at the same time, and while the split screen can take a few tries to get used to, once you do get used to it, it becomes much easier. With that being said, the one drawback is that I find it extremely hard to pull a pitch for a home run. In other words, you're better off slapping everything the other way, since no pitch seems to cross the inside half of the plate.
The other mini game is dubbed the Pitcher Showdown. Much like the home run showdown, this is a race to see who can strike out a predetermined number of batters first, with points being added for strikeouts, and taken away for walks and home runs allowed. I tend to prefer the Home Run Showdown, though the Pitcher Showdown can be extremely challenging.
The franchise mode lets you take control of not only the major league team, but both their Triple A and Double A minor league affiliates. While it seems only the Triple A teams have the real players (and even then, not all of them), it is still an enjoyable feature. Not only do you play the games, but you put together a lineup, starting rotation, and make all the transactions a real MLB team makes: trades, signing free agents, releasing players, call ups and demotions, and placing players on the disabled list. In addition to this, you have an email "inbox," where staff, players, and media can email you. These emails range from a player asking to be traded or have his contract renegotiated, to rumors about the unhappiness of players, to little things such as "Albert Pujols hit his 20th home run last night to take over the league lead."
Another nice touch is the ability to jump in and play in the middle of a simulated game. You can also manage your way through a game, though I find this option to be horrendously long and monotonous. Why not play the game if I have to sit through every pitch and every out? There are also "managerial goals," which range from winning a Cy Young award to leading the AAA league in steals with an individual.
A season mode lets you do all of the above, but only for a single season. You can also skip the season and head straight into the playoffs and try to win a World Series title.
Graphics, Bells and Whistles
The graphics are really pretty basic and don't really show off the capabilities of PS2 as well as some other games have. However, the simple, somewhat detailed graphics are a bit of a nice throwback for a gamer like me. After all, so many games these days tend to look great and play like cr*p, so it's refreshing to see a game not so concerned with how it looks than how it plays.
The stadiums are detailed extremely well, but the crowds bring absolutely nothing to the game. Most of the time they look either lifeless, or if they are full of life, it's basically a little group of them jumping up and down. There's also a decided lack of crowd atmosphere in the game. For a game that pays such keen attention to the details of the stadiums, the lack of warmth in other areas is a bit concerning.
The players tend to look like their real life counterparts, but if you decide to create a player, you are left with only a few different faces to choose from. And when I say "a few," I mean just that. If you were to create a whole bunch of guys in this game, a lot of them would start to look alike, which detracts from the game. With that being said, each batter is given their distinctive stance. I never really noticed this until last night, when I played a game against my father with the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds have a lot of guys with unique stances, and they are copied here perfectly.
As per usual with sports simulations of recent years, the commentary is absolutely horrendous. Not only are the voices of the two guys (Mike Krukow and Duane Kuiper) annoying as can be, but they are repetitive and BORING. Unfortunately, turning them off creates kind of an eerie silence over the game that can take quite a while to get used to, so the best thing might be to just ignore them or turn them down low in the mix, which can be done by going into the audio options section.
Playing the Game
The batter-pitcher interface is one of the better ones in a baseball game in recent years. Apparently, this was first used in the 2003 version, and improvements have been made for this year, though I can't comment on those since I never played last year's version. For hitting, the strike zone is shown and broken up into 9 boxes, each representing a part of the plate. For each zone for each hitter, it shows "hot zones" and "cold zones," as well as neutral zones. These change depending on the handedness of the opposing pitcher, and for created players, it seems they can change every few games or so in franchise mode. You can aim your swing with the left joystick, which means you can try and slap a groundball through a hole in the infield or swing for the fences by attempting to hit a fly ball.
There are some annoying things about the hitting aspect of this game. For one, bunting, at least for me, seems to be impossible. I always either foul it off or pop it up, and it's NEVER successful, and I do mean NEVER. I strongly suggest you get a speedster to steal bases if you're playing in season or franchise mode, otherwise there is just no way to manufacture runs. In addition, it seems that left handed batters have an especially hard time hitting home runs. If you compare a right handed batter and a left handed batter with similar attributes, it doesn't take long to notice that it is immensely harder to hit home runs with the left hand batter. This didn't dawn on me until I read kjell's review. Once I read that, it didn't take long to see he was correct though in his theory.
Another bone to pick would be with "player happiness" in the franchise mode. I have players playing every day who are complaining about playing time. How the hell can you complain about playing time when you play every day? And then I have backups who complain about their time despite the fact they just plain suck. I'm sorry, but my backup catcher is maybe gonna play once every week to ten days. If he's unhappy, then he needs to find another job that will pay him a million bucks for one day of work every ten days.
Pitching is pretty simple. The meter has two stop points: the first decides how effective/how much velocity your pitch will have, the second decides how accurate your pitch will be. Missing the green portion of the meter that appears after you let go of the button for effectiveness can mean that outside fastball is gonna tail back over the plate and be easy pickings for the Alex Rodriguez's of the world to knock over the left field wall. It can also result in pitches that nibble the corners will miss, as well as resulting in wild pitches and passed balls.
Fielding can be frustrating, especially at first. Automatic fielding does everything for you. But this can be a bad thing, as sometimes the computer throws to the wrong base, and there is also an extremely asinine bug that results in a fielder being stuck up against the outfield wall. This can result in an insane amount of triples being hit. Assisted fielding means that the fielders will field the ball for you, but it's up to you to throw to the specific base that you want. Manual fielding means you must field the ball yourself and throw it yourself. Unfortunately, manual fielding can result in you getting a late jump on shallow fly balls which can lead to many more bloop base hits than can be realistically expected.
All in all, pitching is by far the easiest part of the game to master, as the computer does not use the "pitch history" guide to its advantage. Hitting seems to come in spurts, at least with me. My team has gone hot and cold throughout the year, though my record wouldn't show it. This is of course, due to the pitching.
But the best thing about MVP Baseball 2004 is that it feels like a realistic baseball experience. The Jose Offermans of the world are not hitting 36 home runs, and the offensive numbers are not softball style numbers. Since you can adjust the difficulty of every little thing in the game with gameplay meters (from the intelligence of the opposing pitcher to how well you hit), I can see myself playing and being challenged by this game for a good long while to come.
While MVP Baseball 2004 is not perfect, it is by far the best baseball simulation I have played in at least the last 5 years. It is also a huge huge HUGE step up from the Triple Play series that EA made starting with the Sega Genesis in the mid 90s. By the end of the Triple Play series, EA Baseball had become a gigantic joke. Thankfully, MVP Baseball rectifies so much of what made the Triple Play series horrendous. The 2004 version isn't a ninth inning walk off grand slam, but with another bit of tweaking, it could have been.
Groundbreaking hitting control makes it possible to pull the ball down, or swing for the fences -- all swing types included Total control on the field...More at Amazon Marketplace
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