Friday Starter – Trading for Ohtani series launch and a chaotic OOTP mod coming soon

 April 14, 2023  Posted in Friday Starter 268 Views

What does it take to trade for Shohei Ohtani?

Ohtani is the preeminent superstar in Major League Baseball right now and he’s due to be a free agent at the end of the year. Half of the reason to even start a Franchise Mode run in MLB The Show 23 is to find a way to trade for Ohtani and put him on your team, and let the man cook.

So what does it take to get Ohtani for each MLB team that’s lucky enough to not be the Angels in this year’s The Show? That’s what I tested in this blog post.

The post has a slideshow with each team’s fairest offer, in alphabetical order. No spoilers but if you’re a Brewers fan, I think you’ll like what you see.

I’m going to do the same thing in Out of the Park Baseball 24 next. It’ll be a breath of fresh air to do this same experiment in a game where prospects have value!

A sneak peek at something coming soon

I’m Mixon it up and starting on my first ever mod for Out of the Park Baseball. It involves a very culturally important baseball game that you might have Furcotte about. Maybe it makes me a Dorque, but I would trade my Truk to have a physical copy of this game.

A Power Pros medal game in the wild

This Power Pros arcade game is called Powerful Chance, released 1999. You can watch some video of it here. It’s a medal game (think like one of those mostly luck-based token games in a U.S. arcade). Theoretically you can time your button presses well to win so it’s a skill game, just legally distinct enough from slot machines for all the kids out there.

An audio-only baseball video game?

I haven’t made a video yet, but I wanted to share this cool thing a commenter pointed out on one of my YouTube videos. Jim Kitchen made a series of audio-only video games, free games for the blind community. Jim himself was blind, and passed away in 2015. These games have lived on in a free collection called Kitchen’s Sink, which includes a game called Championship Baseball.

The game is audio-only, opening up in a big white window with nothing in it. A voice tells you the controls, which include things like checking the current state of the game and even checking the players’ stats.

I’ve only played some of the batting practice mode, but it works pretty well: Basically a cartoon sound effect will start in your left ear and make its way over to your right, and you need to swing when the ball is about 80% of the way over to the right. There are different sound effects for different types of pitches. A fastball will zip past you quickly. A breaking ball is a loopy sound effect that will vary its timing going from left to the right. And a changeup will sloooowly creep over and tempt you to swing early. There’s a real challenge to it and it’s just interesting to see a game like this.

There are lots of other games in the collection too, though you should be aware they’re not all as G-rated as Championship Baseball.

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