Posts Tagged: Baseball

Experience / Game Design — No Comments
27
Nov 09

Bad developer! No cookie! #1

Designing a game can’t be easy, but there are some things that are simply unforgivable.

redstormrisingBack when Tom Clancy worked with MicroProse on Red Storm Rising in the late ’80s he made a passing comment that once they were finished, they’d never need to create another submarine game again.  Because, after all, it was all just bits and rules – get it right once, and it’ll be perfect forever.  The developers laughed at his naïveté (behind closed doors, I assume – you don’t laugh at a guy with NSA-level connections to his face), but in hindsight, he was probably right: Red Storm Rising, despite all its graphical limitations, is still one of the best submarine games ever created.

In my ongoing (if somewhat sporadic) attempt to explore a new genre, I’ve come to the conclusion that MLB 09: The Show is arguably the closest thing to a “perfect” baseball game out there.  Pitchers change their stance based on the ball they’re throwing, there’s about twelve different ways you can steal bases (right down to being able to slide left or right on your personal approach), and statistics really do mean something throughout the game.  Unfortunately, none of that was worth much to me when I couldn’t even reliably hit a ball, much less understand what the hell the game was telling me when it threw up pages of statistics on team, player, and season performance with no reference or assistance. Continue reading →

Experience / Game Design — 4 Comments
10
Oct 09

Numbers? We Don’t Need No Stinking Numbers!

I was lost.  Seriously lost.  And homesick.

The first part of this series is available here:  Play ball, sports fans!

You know that feeling you get when you step off the plane in a foreign country, make your way past the slavering jackals in immigration, step outside for the first time and get punched in the gut by the humidity, stare at all the signs written in strange, sometimes moving sigils for twenty minutes until you finally get accosted by a bizarre man wearing spectacles who’s waving some yellow paper in hand and trying to drag you into a three-wheeled trike with a donkey in the back, and, amidst all the chaotic raucous, you pause and ask yourself what the hell you were thinking in the first place?

Yeah, that was me about fifteen minutes after loading up MLB 09: The Show. Continue reading →

Experience / Game Design — 3 Comments
2
Oct 09

Play Ball, Sports Fans!

Embarking on a voyage of discovery needn’t involve travelling to foreign countries, although it may sometimes feel like it.

I’m not much of a sportsman.  As far as revelations go, that ranks up there somewhere between MTV’s sudden realisation that Kanye West is a general jackass and that Cliffy B has a somewhat unhealthy obsession with too many burly men packed into too small a space too far away from their wives.  Who, apparently, are ‘unfortunately’ no longer in the picture, so to speak.

But, I digress.

I’m not much of a sportsman; on some level, I never really got sports.  Basketball I understood, but then again, I was tall.   And, when you’re tall and speak with an American accent in Australia, it’s a given that you can shoot a hoop, trash talk, and dunk.  Still, performance on the court aside, on some level I could at least get the attraction to sports.  If not physically then intellectually – the rules offered interesting dynamics, even if I frequently couldn’t play worth squat. While I didn’t have close to the requiste knowledge to understand A-list team dynamics, the attraction constantly floated just beyond my realm of comprehension, much like most of the deconstructionism we covered in English lit.  There was something there, even if I couldn’t touch it, explain it, or fully understand it. Continue reading →