Review @ Out of Eight

[JaguarUSF]

A review of Out of the Park Baseball 10 has been posted at Out of Eight PC Game Reviews:
Out of Eight PC Game Reviews: Out of the Park Baseball 10 Review
Enjoy!

[professor ape]

Very nice!!!

[kq76]

This line threw me:

Usually when I review a sequel, I compare it against the original game and rate the changes and improvements.

Anybody else not like that? On the surface of it, yeah, it makes sense because if you have the previous version, you want to know whether it's worth buying the sequel. But where it bugs me is that if a lot of reviewers grade this way then maybe you can have a sequel grade worse than its predecessor when in fact the reviewer may still feel the sequel is better.

Take OOTP2007 for instance. On metacritic it's still tied for #1 PC game of all-time (or as long as metacritic's been doing their thing). How does OOTP9, which most people here I'm sure would say is a better game than OOTP2007, do? Oh, 14 points worse. By this logic, it's no wonder OOTP2007 did so well considering its predecessor.

Sorry, but that's just a peeve of mine. If I'm looking at a review I want to know flat out how good the game is, not just whether it's worth an upgrade. Remember, not everyone is a previous buyer. It's understandable that things might be skewed by the year released (it's tough to compare scores between games released a decade or 2 apart), but when I'm looking at ratings I'm looking to decide which game is better A or B, not whether B is an improvement over Y and A over X.

/ rant.

On to the meat of the review..

I'm glad that he brought up that you still can't sort on the transactions page, that the AI sometimes releases good prospects and more often leaves you without a proper minor league roster (not enough whatever position). Each of those bug me as well.

I don't understand what screen he's talking about when he says, "Also, the complete team roster does not indicate who is actually on your 40-man roster (all they need to do is add the star next to the name)". Does he not know about the 40 man pull down menu item on the roster screen or the changeable frames in the transactions screen? It does remind me of a wish of mine: on the minor league pitching and lineups screen have it so you can show whether they're on the 40 man for when you're trying to decide who to temporarily promote.

I also don't understand his, "There are still some interface oddities that frankly should have been eliminated by now: having information on both web pages and the traditional interface". I'm unclear: is he complaining that there's no point in duplicating this info? Does he not understand that the html is probably more for online leagues where you might want to check your team, but don't have access to the game? If anything, I think there's still info missing from those pages like pitch ratings.

Lastly, he mentions that the left-handed lineups are to the right of the right-handed lineups. I usually use the individual lineups as I like to pay attention to my depth so I thought for sure he must have been mistaken about the overall screen, but nope. Same thing on the toolbar now that I notice it. I hope it doesn't throw me now too.

[PotatoPeeler]

Originally Posted by kq76

This line threw me:

This one threw me as well:

Because I already did a review of Out of the Park two years ago, I am mainly going to focus on the new features here, as all of the features of the past games are included here (take that, sequels that remove stuff).

[StyxNCa]

Originally Posted by kq76

I'm glad that he brought up that you still can't sort on the transactions page, that the AI sometimes releases good prospects and more often leaves you without a proper minor league roster (not enough whatever position). Each of those bug me as well.

It sure would be nice if I didn't have to control transactions and promotions/demotions on the minor league level.

The other thing I was hoping would come along was something a mod created in the earlier (6.5 and earlier) versions. It would sort player's achievements by achievement on their history page which made it a lot easier to read.

[JaguarUSF]

Some comments on comments...

Review scores:
That's the policy I have used: if I reviewed the previous game, I rate the improvements. My reason? That's how I do expansion packs, and I consider yearly sequels to be full-priced stand-alone expansions. I'm thinking about doing two scores (one for the improvements, one for the overall game), but I think I'm too far along (530 reviews and counting) to change now. Different review sites do different things with sequels, but that's how I approach it most of the time. It's gotten me into trouble before (specifically with one publisher and my review of City Life World Edition, which, while the game as a whole was fine, added nothing of value and got a low score since I reviewed the original game a year earlier). There's no "right" way of doing it, just my way :-)

40 man:
I do know about the pull-down roster, but I want to see who is on my 40-man when I am looking at the entire organization roster, so that I can assure that the 40 players I want are on the 40-man roster without having to write down or remember who specifically is there.

Duplicating info:
I suppose it's better to be in both places instead of just one, but it seems to be redundant. It becomes more of an issue when some things are in HTML but not in the "classic" interface.

[jar2574]

Originally Posted by StyxNCa

It sure would be nice if I didn't have to control transactions and promotions/demotions on the minor league level.

You don't, do you? I thought I saw an option to let the minor league managers handle that.