MVP 06: NCAA Baseball

“Ping!”

Xbox
Released in 2006 by EA Sports
Grade: B

This will be a lengthy review, so here’s the short version:

MVP 06: NCAA Baseball is the followup to the highly celebrated MVP Baseball 2005, which is a well-fleshed-out, realistic baseball sim. EA lost their license to recreate Major League Baseball and settled for making the first ever college baseball game. While there are new analog controls for hitting and fielding (which can thankfully be toggled to the more intuitive classic controls), EA did nothing to the gameplay to distinguish it as college baseball. The only difference is you’ve got college uniforms, auto-generated player names, ballparks that feel a lot like spring training ballparks, and the “ping” of a metal bat.

Where it falls in the series

Okay, let’s get into this nonsense…

EA baseball had a few name changes along the way, and by the time they hit the PS2/Xbox generation, they were calling themselves Triple Play (see Triple Play 2002). Why so many name changes? Probably because their games were never very good. But they finally turned it around in 2003 when they changed to the MVP name. MVP Baseball 2003 introduced the now-familiar pitching meter, and the rest of the gameplay was improved, making for an intuitive but challenging baseball sim.

In 2005, over on the football side of video game happenings, EA Sports struck a deal to acquire the exclusive NFL license, which shut out 2K Sports, who had just released one of the best football games ever, ESPN NFL 2K5. This pisses off gamers to this very day, and it sure as hell pissed off the bigwigs at 2K at the time. So, what did they do in retaliation? They struck an MLB exclusivity deal to shut EA out of the less popular, less lucrative baseball market. Not quite a death blow…

… and to make matters worse for 2K, they didn’t get full, total, complete, no-doubt-about-it exclusivity of the MLB license. Instead, their deal was limited to third-party publishers making games for multiple consoles. That meant Sony was free to continue their MLB series because it only appeared on PlayStation. And well, Sony’s series (dubbed “The Show” in 2006) was better than everything else on the market, even in 2005. 2K spent eight years as the only MLB game on Xbox consoles, but still they couldn’t compete with The Show, who now dominates baseball gaming year after year, unopposed. Baseball fans simply understand that an Xbox console won’t fulfill their baseball needs.

Anyway, this game feels like it was basically developed to be the next MLB game, but with college elements halfheartedly swapped in. I couldn’t help but wonder how neat it would have been if EA did something radically different, like a pro-style game with made-up teams, but it probably wouldn’t have mattered in the long run. EA released this, then followed with a 2007 version, then called it quits and probably spent long, sleepless nights crying on the stacks of money that roll in every fall when Madden comes out.

Praises and gripes

Hey there, welcome back to reading a review and not a chapter in a history book. This game isn’t so bad. It’s very sim-focused, steeped in baseball’s good old-fashioned dullness. Pitching uses a “release for power, press for accuracy” pitching meter, and pitchers routinely hit their mark if you time it right. Expect to have a solid, fundamental gameplan on the mound, because at-bats can turn into strategic battles.

In the batter’s box, the default analog control has you pull back and push up on the right thumbstick, which I found quite difficult. Luckily, you can choose the “classic” system of just pushing a button, or press and direct the swing with the “zone” system. This game gets batting almost right. I don’t know if it’s the physics or the camera angle or what, but I never felt fully comfortable picking up the ball’s velocity and movement.

In the field, the action has a frenetic, lifelike energy to it, along with realistic AI and outcomes. (At least they’re realistic to MLB action, like everything else in this game. I don’t think real-life college kids turn bing-bang-boom double plays and make crazy diving catches quite like they do here.) One big gripe is that the umpires completely blow calls on the bases.

Visually, the game is certainly playable even generations later, and it has kind of a no-nonsense, circa-2006 charm, but it’s not what I would call a pretty game. The players are too shadowy and they seem to exist on a different planet from the stadium backgrounds. Besides your nicely canned pitch and swing animations, a lot of the action looks choppy and inexact. Some of the jarring presentation hiccups from MVP 2005 seem to have disappeared, though, which is nice.

Just like MVP 2005, this game is loaded with options, including a ton of sliders on a 100-point scale, so you can tweak the settings to your skills. I always appreciate the option to speed up the pace of play, although it could be a little faster.

All in all, if you liked MVP 2005, you’d like this just fine, but would you ever really want to play it? You’d probably just keep playing MVP 2005, which, ironically, was known for a state-of-the-art franchise mode that kept gamers hooked through multiple seasons. Isn’t that convenient?

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