Friday, April 16, 2010

Back from Blogging Hiatus

Yep it's been a while. I would "apologize" but I won't. I need my downtime from gaming, blogging, and constant Internet interaction.

So with my batteries (somewhat) recharged I can get into what's going on the Abner Gameworld.

EA sent me an early copy of World Cup 2010...there's no embargo info attached but I learned my lesson with THAT a while back (see NCAA 09 Fiasco) so I need to call EA before I can start talking about it. I imagine it's good because I enjoyed Fifa 10 quite a bit.

Out of the Park Baseball 11 -- a game I shockingly forgot to mention on last night's podcast (duh) has been eating my time. I have played every version of this game starting with v3 and every year I go into saying "no way will this be worth the money" -- I say this because I really enjoy OOTP but it suffers the same as do big publisher sports games -- what can you really expect in a 10 month cycle? And we're now on the 11th edition and with text games it's even tougher because you really can't sell "better graphics".

Well, so far OOTP 11 is a surprisingly big upgrade over 10 -- not so much for the sim engine (I really can't tell much of a difference there) but from an interface, speed, and tightening of the screws perspective. Version 10 I still find to be buggy. I play V10 every single day because I run an online league. I still see duplicate players, weird sign/release bugs, batting order bugs and other anomalies. So far anyway V11 looks rock solid and for such a *huge* game that's pretty rare.

Being such a large game doing a review takes a while but thus far all signs point to "upgrade". Today is a big test as I try to import my OOTP 10 online league and see how that shakes out.

I STILL hope one day OOTP adds rudimentary graphics. Nothing big. I don't need motion capture. But man I sure would like to see some graphics ala MicroLeague Baseball circa 1984.














Anyway, tonight is co-op Splinter Cell with Brandon. Nothing like simming baseball games all day and following that up by shooting a terrorist in the face.