The ScooterBlog

I’ve began to embark on playing MLB 09: The Show, as my baseball game of choice this year. Based on the first few practice rounds and games I’ve played, I have no reason to feel disappointed about this. The game does a great job portraying modern-day 2009 baseball, and even the World Series Baseball 2K9 series looks to do a pretty good job of this.

That all said though, as time goes on, there is only so much you can do with the current-day game and current rosters. A direction in content that I’d like to see these games go is backwards, into the history of the game, allowing gamers to better re-create the history of our national pastime, both in players and venues.

THE PLAYERS – How cool would it be to, with a click of a mouse, be able to go back in time and play baseball with rosters from any past year! Simulation games and sites have already been able to harness history to create these mythical matchups (Baseball Mogul, WhatIfSports.com come to mind), so why not bring it to a fully interactive next-gen game.  MLB 09 does get closer than most games on this front, allowing user-created rosters to be traded about over their site. The only problem is that any roster traded assumed a 30-team league, which makes re-creating any season before 1998 challenging, if not impossible. Maybe it needs to be amended to allow create-a-teams, or create-a-seasons. I know some things can’t be re-created, but flexibility would allow quite a bit to be.

THE SEASONS – To that same effect, baseball was played differently even 10 or 20 years ago. Doubleheaders were normal fare, even scheduled. Four-man rotations were a normal occurrence, and the season didn’t last as long as it did not. Heck, no baseball game has ever managed to conquer a season-long weather pattern and (God forbid) rainouts! I would love to see a completely wide open customization of schedules and seasons made available, so that you could go back to a 16-team 154-game season if you so chose, and allow for slider adjustments specifically for certain types of play, like four-man rotations. Maybe someone can fork out a few thousand bucks and get a Farmer’s Almanac license deal in there too, I bet they’d dig it!

THE STADIUMS – This is the one feature I could see being included as downloadable content, and for the record, if it’s done right, I’m cool with it. You can of course play all the modern parks every single year, but how much fun would it be to go play in classic stadiums … ANY of them! I realize that this is a huge undertaking for any developer, considering that over the past 20 years, I’d venture that 80% of the stadiums are freshly built, and the remainder have had some refurbishments (like a Wrigley Field, sans lights … hey, games called by darkness!!). But, if there were stadium packs, and even like in old PS2 Madden games, create-a-stadium options with a fancy owner mode, imagine the realism you could attain.

Let’s face it, history makes baseball what it is. That’s why people get so bent out of shape about the steroids scandal, it messes with that history in ways that are hard to undo. That said though, there’s no reason that technology can’t help bring history to the current with video games. The tech is already in place, it just has to be nearly pushed into one interactive package.

Last Saturday, I had the chance to attend a little video game show held close to the OSU campus area called CORGS-CON 2009. It was being held at the undercroft of a church in the area, and didn’t have a terribly impressive web site. So, it was hard to gather what kind of show it was going to be and how many people would be there. The only part I knew is that I was going to meetup with a couple of friends from Cincinnati making the trip.

As it turned it, it was very much just a swap meet with a few minor events (a couple of high score contests, a quick presentation or two) mixed in. Due to where it was and the cramped atmosphere of it, I made a few laps around the 20 or so vendor tables, picked up a couple of sweet deals, and headed out to hang with said friends from Cincy for the rest of the day.I got:

* Street Fighter PS2 Ken Joypad for $5 (in the box, looks great)

* Atari 2600 Slik Stik for $3

* PS2 to XBox/GC Controller converter for $2

There were maybe 8 or 9 vendors there, and the room was crowded, but that’s more because the room was really small. Nonetheless, I’m glad I went, and I think it could be something that can be built up much more as time goes on. Hopefully, all of that will prove true.