My favorite modern age baseball sim
I've cut my teeth with all sort of baseball games. I tried older games in the Triple Play series, I've tried Out of the Park Baseball and many more games, but when I think of the moment when baseball simulation on the PC reached a moment of maturity, I generally think of this game, MVP Baseball 2004. That is because not only was the game fully 3D rendered, but it also had captured the game much better than other sims; yes, it still features minigames for the distinct portions of the game, but now they are all more simulation than arcade. That is because your skills as a player take second place and the game does a check upon your player's skills, thus reducing the chance of the individual player becoming irrelevant in terms of who he is. But don't be scared, that doesn't mean that the game is some boring turn based number cruncher, nope, it's just that the abilities of individual players count towards the result of the game more than in other games. Plus, they have distinct moves and all these are captured by the game's animations, which, in most respects are spot on. Yeah, there will be other better looking games in the years to come but with MVP Baseball 2004 EA had reached the point where it kind of cornered the recipe of the game, which will only be cleaned in years to come rather than have it rethought completely.
