Baseball, America’s past time, prime candidate for a game. Most
people are familiar with baseball games in terms of titles like High
Heat or World Series, graphical action sports. Most of the time, the
other aspect of baseball gets ignored, that is the manager aspect.
This is where .400 Studios Decides to take their title, Out of the
Park Baseball 5. To be honest, I have never played a sports manager
sim before, but there is a first time for everything, and the idea
really intrigues me. Now, on to the nitty gritty of it all.
Graphics
OOTP5 is mainly a text based manager sim with catchy graphics to
hold it in. There aren’t any impressive visuals or 3D models, but it
does get the job done. Importantly, text is well selected and
nothing is blurry. Still, there is pretty much nothing to look at
while playing the game other than a background of a baseball park
and scoreboards.
Sounds
Again, being a baseball sim, sounds don’t really seem to matter
much. When running a game in manager mode, you do get treated to a
few sounds here and there, like crowd noises, ump talk, and things
like bat strikes, but otherwise, the game is pretty much silent.
Gameplay
Now THIS is where it is all at. OOTP5 is remarkably deep when it
comes to gameplay. I started my game in a sort of fantasy draft
mode. First, it went to this screen where it prompted me to select
my city and various support individuals, like coaches and scouts.
These guys greatly affect the rest of the draft process as well as
how players advance during the season. So, I go in and make my shot.
Handing out contracts is simple enough, double click on the guys
name, fire off a salary figure and contract limit, and assign him to
a job. I noticed that here you are able to adjust the abilities of
all the managers, etc. It kind of worried me as I hoped I could not
do this with the players and make some Uber Team. So, I hit my
continue button, and found my first error. A few of them denied my
contracts, but apparently the game would not let me go back and try
to fill my gaps. I am now without an AA manager and a pitching
coach. It may have not adversely affected my season, but I think it
could have helped some.
Now, on to the character draft. First thing I noticed is that
there is a complete lack of professional players. Major plus here, I
am sick of having to deal with pampered athletes. So, I simply went
through, selecting my Joe Blow characters until I finished up my
draft. This is where your managers begin to take effect. During the
draft, each character has a set of skills with an easy to understand
wording system to describe each one. Of course, this is based on
your support staff abilities. I noticed multiple times that player
stats would change between rounds and wildly adjust themselves. This
I attribute to my managers’ poor eye for player abilities as I
didn’t hire quality pitching/batting types. An odd negative here was
the lack of player salaries. After the draft, it felt as if they
were playing their first year, free of charge. I expected this to
work like the manager draft; instead each player had a starting fee
based on abilities. So, I have this huge budget of like 74 million,
and I only used up around 2 of it on coaches and such.
Next, game time. There is an option to adjust your lineup as you
see fit, but being non-hardcore, I let the computer fill out my
depth chart. It seemed to do a good job at it as I scanned over
everything and the best person for the position was put in the
lineup and adjusted to the right position in the lineup. Playing the
games is simple as well. You can either simulate it, in which case
it just runs it through the system and plops out a result, or you
can manage it pitch by pitch. Pitch by pitch is easy as there are
icons on the bottom that ask you pitching, fielding, and offensive
strategies. Player stats seem to be encoded in really well and play
as you would expect them to.
Now, if I had a choice, I would add something, ballpark managing.
Here you can adjust ticket prices, soft drink prices, kinds of
paraphernalia in which to purchase, etc. It would have been nice to
be able to play with that and up your profits when the team is doing
well and people are more willing to show up and watch.
The biggest negative, overall, about the gameplay is the poor
documentation. I basically had to stumble through the game at first
to get a hang of everything before I could sail through without
trouble.
Loading Times – Makes the PS2 Seem Fast
The overall worst aspect of this title is the loading times. My
machine, while not the beast on the block, is by no means a slouch.
When a PC with a 1.8 GHz processor and 512 Megs of RAM on a well
maintained system struggles on a text game, something is wrong. The
worst of it was during the opening part of the draft, where I almost
hit the reset button because I thought the system froze. Going
between screens has a small lag as well as a small lag when
simulating games. This literally shaved a good 1.5 points off the
final score. Long loads are unacceptable.
Bottom Line
OOTP5 is actually a very deep baseball manager simulation. Apart
from the refusal to let me fill my manager circle and apparent
uselessness of money, the title has a lot to offer. Beware of the
load times, though, they can be bad, but otherwise, good times can
be had here, especially if you are a baseball nut.
