The Blog for the Sports Gamer

I actually have a lot of work to do this afternoon. This morning I took Ashley to her Kintergarten placement testing. Did anyone else have to do this when they were a kid? We just sorta got thrown into school. The tests were easy, even for a 5 year old, so I think it’s just a test to see if cognitively everything is ok. Which block is blue, repeat these sentences, what steps do you take to brush your teeth? That sorta thing. I was in the room with her during these tests, sitting quietly but wanting to shout out an answer if she paused after a question. It’s a trick Ashley, they’re all blue blocks! Anyway, she had a blast. She ‘passed’ the test and will start school in August.

But that took most of the morning. Well, that and a father/daughter breakfast at the local family restaurant. I love this little town. Pretty much every store/shop and eatery takes cash or check. No debit cards. Even the Subway takes checks and doesn’t take a Visa. I’ll get used to it. I’m even learning to accept the damn rooster. After we ate breakfast I saw that the guy we bought our PT Cruiser from was sitting at the counter drinking coffee. He said hi and asked about the Cruiser, then asked the waitress, whom he addressed by her first name, for more coffee.

Daddy’s in Mayberry. I have to get Todd out here. Some fresh air will do him some good.

Anyway, that was my morning and like I said I do have a lot of work to do. GameSpy sent me a beta of Heroes of Might and Magic V which I really want to see, being a fan of the series since the original back in the days of DOS. I also need to edit this TP Golf interview (which is pretty good) and start on a dreadfully late review of BFME2.

But I keep thinking about MLB 06: The Show.

A week or so ago my buddy Bill Harris blogged that The Show was a significantly better game than High Heat Baseball, a game that he knows damn well I hold near and dear to my heart. (I come to find out later that he was specifically talking about the PSP version). I recently had a chance to play the old HH on the PC again because my dad installed it on an old Win98SE machine just so he could play it. (High Heat hates XP.) A few mods were installed, a tune file tweaked, and the high-res stadiums added. High Heat 2002 PC still, to this day, plays a very good game of baseball. It’s fast, simple, and addcitive with an interface to die for.

But like so many things in life, some things are better the way we remember them rather than how they actually were in reality. The ball physics in HH are very simple — you never see a high chopper or a very slow roller and pitched balls move at a snail’s pace compared to today’s games. One of my problems with the HH PBI was that it was tough for the CPU to strike me out, even with everything tweaked. Still, for a 5 year old game High Heat 2002 PC holds up remarkably well.

But The Show, on the field, just might be better. It still cannot compare to High Heat’s game interface, which no console game can do. It’s taken me about 20 games to warm up to it but right now I’m red hot lovin’ this game. I’m playing a Reds franchise, playing one game of each series and simming the rest (my usual MO in baseball games) and it’s uncanny how authentic the game feels at times. With Dunn I either walk, whiff, or hit a 500 foot homer. I miss a lot of pitches with Dunn that I can drill with Felipe Lopez. My starters are decent enough but I have lost about 10 leads due to the tradegy that is the Reds bullpen. When it’s time to bring in a relief pitcher, I feel like I’m walking to the gallows. Rarely do I see something that makes me think to myself, ‘Well that was just stupid.’

I strikeout, I walk, I hit doubles now thanks to lowering arm accuracy and stregnth a bit, and am genrerally having the most fun playing arcade baseball since, well, High Heat 2002 PC. And it feels really good.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 20th, 2006 at 12:29 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.