Tired of going pro? How about going amateur
The new gameplay trailer is out for MLB The Show 25, showcasing in broad terms the new features coming to this year’s game. Chief among them:
- As speculated here last week, college teams are confirmed a new addition to the Road to the Show player career mode. These colleges are confirmed in the trailer: University of South Carolina, University of Texas, LSU, Cal State Fullerton, UCLA, TCU, Vanderbilt, and Tennessee. (UPDATE: These were subsequently confirmed as the only eight colleges included in The Show 25)
- This means metal bats, and some new high school and college parks (they all look to be fictional, though one is made to look like Omaha)
- A new hitting mechanic called Ambush Hitting is on the way. This seems to be a new form of the old “Guess Pitch” mechanic, most likely. The trailer briefly shows a PCI expanding and shrinking. We’ll get more details soon.
- First-person gameplay out in the field. This could be really cool, or nauseating, or both.
- New quick-time events for fielding and baserunning, I think primarily for Road to the Show. I am not a fan of this, personally. There are more elegant ways to simulate athleticism than a random on-screen button prompt.
- A new board game-ish mode in Diamond Dynasty called Diamond Quest.
- Manny Ramirez confirmed as a new legend.
And I’ve seen some grumpiness around the internet about the graphics continuing to grow stale, with no obvious change in player models. The faces still look like they’re molded inexpertly out of clay:
There’s always next year to catch up with Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2024-2025.
No less than Ken Rosenthal grumping about the cover athletes
Famed baseball reporter Ken Rosenthal headlined his column this week with some gripes about the MLB The Show 25 cover stars. He’s not the only one to point out that Bobby Witt Jr. outperformed all three stars on the cover (Paul Skenes, Elly De La Cruz, and Gunnar Henderson) last year, and is similarly young. The baseball podcast “Effectively Wild” had the same talking point.
I don’t have a huge issue with the choice of stars, and it’s not as much of a headscratcher as Jazz Chisholm was a few years ago. But it’s true that Witt is in the same category of young shortstop stars as two of the three on the cover, and he’s a better player to this point.
The three seem to be chosen to reflect the three different amateur paths to the big leagues: High school draftees (Gunnar), college draftees (Skenes), and international amateurs (Elly). Witt was a high school draftee, so he would have replaced Gunnar if all else were equal. I remain curious what-all goes into the cover star choices. If you know anything about it from a previous title, email me!
Backyard Baseball ’97 coming to mobile
In October last year, the original game of the Backyard Sports series was re-released for PC under the title Backyard Baseball ’97. A few weeks ago, the team announced ’97 is coming soon to smartphones as well. No news yet on the other re-releases they’ve announced, including Backyard Baseball ’01, or what player or league licenses they may include, or on the announced new Backyard Sports game from Mega Cat Studios.
The new Backyard Sports team also appeared at Cubs Con. My main takeaway is good God, look at this hulking, massive Pablo Sanchez:
MLB brand control guidelines revealed
The Video Game History Foundation launched a new archive site last week. This site is a searchable database of gaming history, pulling together various kinds of resources mostly from the VGHF’s actual headquarters and making them publicly available (though not downloadable, sadly).
At launch, the biggest chunk of what’s out there is a database of game magazines. As someone who’s used OCR (Optical Character Recognition technology) both in my day job and for a hobby project, I have to commend their use of it here. Even the smallest details, like text on signs in small photographs, get recognized successfully by their OCR and show up correctly in search results.
Anyway, I took a look through for some baseball-related content and there will be plenty enough to dig through for years and years, even before they add new materials in the future.
One major resource is a collection called the “Mark Flitman papers.” Mark Flitman worked as a video game producer at various companies over the years, including Konami, Acclaim, and Midway. (I happened to buy his book, It’s Not All Fun & Games, a couple months ago and have been slowly reading it). And seemingly everything he’s ever had his hands on is in the database. This leads to a lot of development material for the MLB Slugfest series.
Two things I particularly enjoyed seeing from this:
- A file folder of font references for MLB teams. You can’t download the actual Illustrator files for them sadly, but you can screencap to your heart’s delight:
- Brand control guidelines for MLB as of 2001. I was pretty stunned at the level of control MLB asks for from anyone looking to publish a licensed game. They not only need to okay your portrayal of the logos and uniforms in-game, but they have to approve the stadium advertisements. And best of all, you need to type, print, and fax a sheet with all the song lyrics in the soundtrack so MLB can give them the okay. Is the league that concerned that an Eminem song could be a brand risk?
The collection also includes photos of Mark with Roger Clemens (for Roger Clemens MVP Baseball):
And Hank Aaron, for Aaron vs. Ruth: Battle of the Big Bats (shown under a working title in the image below:
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Pixel Pro Baseball (iOS) Gameplay – I’m still not really a mobile game guy, but I enjoyed this one. Took a little getting used to the MLB The Show style of having to watch the pitch come in and aim for it, but this was fun after I got past the learning curve.
- Pro Yakyuu Spirits 2010 (PS3) Gameplay – Now that Prospi 2024-2025 has set a new high bar for graphics, it’s hard to say this is the best-looking baseball game ever, but it may have the best presentation/direction in the little moments in-between gameplay. A gorgeous game.