Sports Games Thread

[Greggulator]

Is there a basketball game out there similar to OOTP or Football Manager? Would *LOVE* that.

[Death From Above]

There's a game on Steam called World Basketball Tycoon but it has very, very poor reviews on the whole. So really in short the answer is "probably no right now".

[Dewar]

Fast Break Basketball would probably be the closest. I still have the 2003 version of Fast Break College Basketball on my computer, and I love it. Never played the pro version though.

 

http://www.fbbgames.com/dl.htm

 

Download the demo and give it a test run.

[Craig H]

So with this year's version of The Show, I decided to dedicate most of my time to Diamond Dynasty. So far, I feel like this is a good move because the improvements to Diamond Dynasty and online play are huge. Playing online last year was rough because of lag issues. This year is so much better. Plus, you now only use one created player in Diamond Dynasty, so managing your team is less cumbersome. I played two games online, winning them both, and it was pretty enjoyable...except for the hitting.

 

Man, so far, I am not feeling the changes they made to hitting. As mentioned earlier, the new Directional Hitting system basically replaces Timing Hitting, but it doesn't feel right at all. I'm not sure it's because of how I have the camera placed or what, but it's very difficult to tell if the pitch coming in is going to be a ball or a strike so I just wind up swinging at everything. I still can spot a meatball curve from a mile away and have turned three of those into homers, but everything else looks off. I think part of it may be due to how zoomed in the camera is, so the strike zone looks enormous and thus, most incoming pitches look like strikes. I changed the view of the camera, but I don't think that change translates over to Diamond Dynasty because the camera is right back to where it was before. It will probably take some getting used to.

 

Pitching still feels weird to me too and I think that's just an issue with HDTV lag. I'm hitting X right near the yellow bar when the meter swings back, but my pitch still winds up being slightly wild.

 

Then there's fielding. I don't recall having this issue last year, but players out in the field move so fast. It's ridiculous. I was snagging balls out in center field with no issues. Then again, it's probably just me and everything is fine.

 

I'm using the throwing meter for fielding and was wondering how full it should be for accuracy, to the blue?

 

If you're fielding, the longer you hold down a button to throw the ball, the more power you're giving it, but you're also sacrificing accuracy. 

[Death From Above]

OOTP fantasy league craziness.

 

I just won a game scoring 5 runs in the top of the 21st inning to win 9-4. I would have been really mad if I'd lost after all that. Two guys in the game had 10 at bats (which is now the co-record for at bats in a game), my guy went 5-for-10. Both teams scored one in the 11th.There were no runs scored from the 12th until the top of the 21st.

 

Game time 6 hours 32 minutes.

 

I'm first in my mythical north division about 60 games into season 2 after being exactly .500 in year one.

[Raziel]

So, since its only $40, I'm wondering if there's enough changes to MLB 15 for PS3 that its worh picking up, or just keep paying 14 and wait for my eventual PS4 pickup and upgrade it then.

[The Man Known as Dan]

Doing one of the OOTP random start from 1901 and man the storylines are fun as hell

 

In the early going, the league was obviously dominated by pitching, but the main story around the actual players was a "Which guy will end up having a better career" between Ed Delahanty of the Senators and Shoeless Joe Jackson of the Yankees. Both were drafted at very young ages (22 and 20, respectively), and both were cornerstones of there franchises. Both were generally the face of baseball for the greater part of a decade. 22 years later, the dust has finally just about settled, it looks like this: Delahanty's teams were more succesful (3 World Series rings), and rapped up his career with a little over 2700 hits, a career OPS of .814 and a plain silly 883 steals, sealing his resume as sure fire HOFer with 5 MVP's. And yet he still comes across as clearly the second best. While Delahanty has been retired for 3 years, Shoeless Joe just keeps producing years were he bats in the 330's like clockwork, finishing his age 41 season with a 337 average. A career .331 hitter, the first in the game so far to break 400 (a 410 season in 1902 at age 21 no less), Jackson is up to a 3,475 career hits, and will, by the time he retires, be considered the best hitter of all time, leading just about every counting stat in baseball outside of homers and triples. 

 

That said, neither one holds the career WAR for a positional player crown. That goes to Joe Mauer, who put up back to back years of 10 plus in for the Red Sox. He has a pretty good lead in the club house for "Best Catcher to Ever Play" and, his 1907 383/454/470 slash line let to a 12.0 WAR season, which is insane.

 

As for the mound, that's where the only people elected to the Hall of Fame reside. Tommy Bridges and Robin Roberts probably would be regarded as having the best careers, both with over 200 wins and ERA's south of 2.35 career. Red Ames is the all time leader in wins, and a no duh inclusion. Homer Bailey is in, though his career is more a "fringe case" HOF, he got in possibly due to lack of strong other options at that point. But Homer looks likes an easy inclusion compared to the 5th, Hyun-jin Ryu, who got into the hall with a losing record. 209-245 career record with a 2.84 ERA (highest of the field), a career WHIP of 1.32, etc. Just felt like a really weird inclusion.

 

As for present times, a new era has started and it's filled with more great hitters then the league knows what to do with. The Cards have Duke Snider, the Browns have Billy Williams, The Pirates have just decided they hate everyone and have a 3-4-5 of Mickey Mantle-Lou Gehrig-Mel Ott, The Athletics are fielding Roberto Alomar, Stan Musial, Robin Yount, Ernie Banks, Dick Allen, Jim Dwyer, and Jorge Posada in one freaking lineup. The Giants have Larry Walker, David Ortiz, Darryl Strawberry, and Brooks Robinson. The Yanks have Sammy Sosa, Jose Altuve, Wade Boggs, Jack Clark, and Joe Morgan and still manage to be 20 games under 500. The Reds have Eddie Collins and Jose Canseco, The Cubs have Bobby Bonds, the only man with a Triple Crown, while his son Barry plays on the White Sox instead. 

 

As for early home run champions: Ken Griffey Jr. holds down the career home run leader crown... for the moment. He is getting old, and others are breathing down his neck quick. The single season record one made me laugh hard, with Cecil Fielder hitting 24.  And right now, the best player in baseball seems to be Hank Greenberg, who has been on a complete path of destruction in recent years. He's already up to 49.1 WAR at age 28, headlined by his amazing 1.128 OPS 2021. He has taken the last 3 MVP's.

 

Overall, this is awesome to do.

[Raziel]

So, how close is OOTP to being FM for Baseball?  Because I would dig the shit out of that.

[Jiji]

Pretty damn close. Both are equally as polished and while the in-game stuff is a way bigger part of FM than OOTP, both have incredible immersion. OOTP is more fun, lighthearted, and free in what you are able to do, whereas FM can sometimes come off as SERYUS BUZNIZZ and has a bunch of hardcoded stuff that's very limiting. OOTP is freedom - FM is in the minutiae and control. You can be all controlling with tactics in OOTP but it doesn't come off as a key component like the tactical side of Football Manager does. I really like this year's inclusion of enabling users to choose their role within the organization (manager, general manager, or both). I tend to go with just general manager but watch the bigger regular season games and all the playoff games.

 

I haven't done a game where you start way back when in OOTP. I think the oldest start date I've used was sometime in the '60s. If you go back to the 1920s, are there Negro leagues or is it just the AL and NL? Also, is there any way of getting the NCAA setup in modern games? It looks like there were NCAA mods for OOTP 14. Are they compatible?

[Death From Above]

I am not sure if the default game includes Negro League baseball but I am 100% saying there are add ons for it at the very least. The big historic facegen packs definitely include Negro League so there's got to be a reason for that.

 

I'm not sure about add on compatibility year to year myself. One of us should really get on the official OOTP forums and ask a couple questions.

 

I am really shocked how into OOTP I am because I'm really not *that* into baseball compared to a couple other sports, but '14 is a very solid game, and I love the depth of features and tweakability of the whole thing. It's almost like a programming language built entirely around baseball. I play just as GM and let the AI do tactics, I watch almost all my team's games and just keep hitting the "RISP" button to get to the good parts (though you miss solo homeruns doing that, no biggie). As such I am advancing extremely slowly but enjoying it. I spend so much time digging through stuff between games.

 

I'd actually say in some ways OOTP reminds me of Extreme Warfare Revenge (though it's a far broader and more advanced piece of work). If it exists it can be tweaked and it has a surprising amount of charm for a text based game.

 

Computer can't be screwed over terribly in trades in this game, I find. That's a really big change from most other sports sims I have played. AI absolutely treats even average starting pitchers like gold and the price to get them is crazy. This is a good thing. You can't just trade three mediocre prospects and win the world series.

 

Long term hall of fame candidate to watch on my fantasy team is my closer. I drafted him in the initial league draft, he was only 21 but has really really high end numbers (two pitch killer, fastball and slider both maxed, maxed stuff, high movement and control), closing in on through two seasons he has a WHIP of just under 1 and already is past 70 saves. All other pitchers on my team put together have like 6. If he stays healthy and on his game for the next decade he's got a really legit shot at setting my fantasy league all-time saves record that everyone else would chase forever because he started so good so young.

 

Only thing that honestly bugs me about OOTP '14 is there's no feature to turn off career ending injuries. I'm fine with injuries in general I would just rather turn off the Retire Roll Of Death. You can manually edit any player that has one if you are a league commish, but the problem is the minute they get a career ending injury the game automatically retires them and invalidates their contract, and I don't feel like being picky enough to figure out which team and for how long and at what money guys were at. Very minor quibble. Everything else is quite good. It is not like it is happening all the time either, I just feel bad for the three or four fake computerized baseball players denied the last years of their career. If they fixed this in the newer version I really can't see there would be much I could complain about. Only other really minor thing is there should be a way to export a scorecard into a non-html format. Like a "dump game scorecard to notepad" button would be swell.

[Jiji]

I don't know about the trades. I've run about three half-assed Cubs 2015 seasons and each time I'm able to put together a ridiculous starting rotation after snagging Strasburg for something based around Arismendy Alcantara and once even got Zimmermann as well for not that much more (yeah, he's a free agent at the end of the year but this went down early in the season).

 

And yeah, in the three year save I've done so far with '16, there have been a handful of career ending injuries. The worst was when Yu Darvish retired from his current injury. I do believe you can mess around with injury frequency and severity in the commissioner/league settings, so that would address your issue.

 

I wish the game stored prior season info and playoff history better. From what I understand you can't go back and see past post-season trees, which is a shame.

[Death From Above]

Maybe the trade thing is because I'm still in the early years of a custom created league so everyone's prospect pool is thin. Hard to say until I've played a lot more seasons.

[Happ Hazzard]

How big a name was John Madden before the Madden videogame series? Seems weird that his name is still attached to the games when all the other EA Sports titles are just NBA, FIFA, NHL, NASCAR etc. Is he grandfathered in for as long as he lives? Or is it case of the name being so established they don't want to change it?

[muhammedboehm]

Name is so established. Before that faithful Thanksgiving I could have seen Tigers name having stayed attached to EA Golf even after he retired.

[Chaos]

I ordered NBA 2k15 from Amazon when they had their brief $10.99 sale last Monday.  They obviously ran out of their stock, so my shipment has been delayed until near the end of the month.

[Jiji]

Hopefully 2K patches their latest patch by the time you receive it because it's FUBAR'd the game pretty badly.

[Craig H]

Played some more Diamond Dynasty in MLB 15. Of the games I lost, one was because the damn game froze up so I had to close out of MLB 15 and that got me a loss. Another was when I thought my daughter was going to take a nap and I foolishly thought I could sneak a game in. Two innings in and I conceded with a lead. One other loss was because I was lagging like crazy and it felt like my opponent was shooting pitches to me out of a machine gun. After every pitch he was throwing another pitch immediately. Then there was one legit loss. I've won everything else.

 

It's amusing to see players flail away at pitches. For one opponent, I threw nothing, but sinkers and he just kept hacking away no matter where the pitch was located. Everyone wants to try to steal too, which makes it easy to get outs even if you give up a hit. No mercy rule victories yet.

 

Overall, Diamond Dynasty is much, much, much improved if just because I can actually play people online.

 

As for differences between this and MLB 14, I only played MLB 14 on PS4, but I think this was a worthwhile purchase because enough things were improved. So far, it feels like this is the best year yet. Trade logic has been fixed from what I hear, Diamond Dynasty is about perfect, Road to the Show is as great as usual, etc.

[Tabe]

How big a name was John Madden before the Madden videogame series? Seems weird that his name is still attached to the games when all the other EA Sports titles are just NBA, FIFA, NHL, NASCAR etc. Is he grandfathered in for as long as he lives? Or is it case of the name being so established they don't want to change it?

He was a big, big star. He was brought in by EA to lend credibility to their game. The game didn't make him famous - he made the game famous.

Fun story: EA did both Madden NFL for the Genesis and Joe Montana Sports Talk Football. They intentionally tanked the Montana game so theirs would look better but somehow Sega didn't figure that out.

[muhammedboehm]

The three best madden story's I've ever heard are

1) the first time EA came to him about the game they show it to him and he says 'you don't get my name unless it's 11 on 11. anything else isn't football.

2) many years into the game John's at that annual design meeting, and the team shows him a defensive play where the linebackers are x's not triangles and John says 'what's this (pointing to the linebackers) they should be triangles linebackers are always triangles. The next day all defensive plays had triangles for linebackers.

3) he was watching his grandkids play madden saw that they never punted called up the head guy said 'figure out a way to make it so kids have to punt. coaches don't go for it on 4th and short in the 1st quarter and neither should players' The next game had a line of code that made the success rate of going for it on 4th and short to something like less then .0000001%

[Craig H]

FUCK having games need to connect to an online server, especially Sony's shitty servers, which were designed by Mr. Glass. Every time the Sony servers go down, you're lucky to play a game of MLB 15 without anything fucking up. It's totally understandable to not play anything online, like Diamond Dynasty or Online Franchise, but regular old franchise and Road to the Show? Those things should work without any issues.

 

It's the same bullshit as last year. You start the game and if there are server issues the game just loads and then freezes at the start menu. Sometimes, it will unfreeze after almost five minutes, other times you have to back out to the XMB or whatever they're calling it on the PS4 and you have to close the application. Once you do that, you have to go through all that hassle again, hoping that you can just play a game offline.

 

Firmware 2.5 is also fucking this game up. I have closed out of the game, as in chose "Close Application," and then put my system into rest/sleep. When I come back to it, it never really closed out of the game. It's already on the main menu of the game or whatever menu was previously up when you closed the game. That itself causes issues because it won't connect to the server. You have to back out, close the game again and go back into it. Same thing if you go to play another app (not a game), like the WWE Network app. Last night, I wanted to watch the Jericho podcast, so I switched to the WWE Network app. In doing so, the system asks me if I want to do this because it will close MLB 15. I agree to that, watch the podcast, go back to the XMB and then start MLB 15 where to my surprise, it actually didn't close the app and it's locked up on the main menu.

[Brysynner]

Firmware 2.5 is also fucking this game up. I have closed out of the game, as in chose "Close Application," and then put my system into rest/sleep. When I come back to it, it never really closed out of the game. It's already on the main menu of the game or whatever menu was previously up when you closed the game. That itself causes issues because it won't connect to the server. You have to back out, close the game again and go back into it. Same thing if you go to play another app (not a game), like the WWE Network app. Last night, I wanted to watch the Jericho podcast, so I switched to the WWE Network app. In doing so, the system asks me if I want to do this because it will close MLB 15. I agree to that, watch the podcast, go back to the XMB and then start MLB 15 where to my surprise, it actually didn't close the app and it's locked up on the main menu.

 

Seems odd that it wanted you to close the application, because every time I go from my game to an app (Netflix/WWE/Hulu) it just asks me if I want to suspend the game, which is what it sounds like it did here.

[Death From Above]

So my first experience with playoff baseball in OOTP was pretty great. My league format is the old school four-team playoff thing, so two best of 7 series to win. I get in as a division winner (three divisions of 10 teams and one wildcard) but I have to play Brooklyn in the first round, who went 5-1 against me in the regular season and are pretty much my team's boogeyman. Doesn't look promising.

 

Game 1 and 2 go really badly in Brooklyn. Game 1 my pitching ace gets blasted out of the game and we lose 7-0. Game 2 starts better but the fourth and fifth innings both go sideways and we end up losing 9-4. Down 0-2 in the series.

 

We got home for three games. Third game goes no better. We lose 7-1 and are being totally outclassed, especially by the top 5 in Brooklyn's order. Edmonton doesn't have a single homerun, which is really bad for me because my team is really a power hitting club (5 20-hr hitters, we either go big or go nowhere).

 

Game 4 is where the two teams take different strategic paths. We roll out our ace again needing to win, Brooklyn decides to roll out their #4 starter. It actually doesn't start out well for me again, but we haul our ass back into it. Brooklyn also lose their #3 hitting shortstop who hurts himself sliding into second. His replacement is quick and okay defensively but he really isn't a good hitter at all. We end up down 6-5 going into the bottom of the 9th but hit our first homerun of the series, a 3 run walk off, to win 8-6 and at least keep it going.

 

Game 5 it's now my #2 (a knuckleballer that actuallly led my team in wins and innings pitched this year) against their ace. My guy gives up just 2 hits in 8 innings and we cruise 4-0. Back to Brooklyn and at least there's a series.

 

Game 6 is pretty chaotic but we somehow put on another late rally and win 8-7. Brooklyn's burned both of their best two pitchers in game 5 and 6.

 

Game 7 in Brooklyn, the world goes nuts. They have their number three starter in against my ace, and we blast him for 4 in the top of the first. Game still could have been close but in the third their cleanup hitter - who is destroying me, batting .400 in the series with 3 homeruns - decides now is the time to freak out on an umpire over a called third strike and he gets himself ejected. Wonderful, wonderful. I can just imagine this scene playing out in real life and I imagine there's some WCW style garbage tossing from the crowd. Brooklyn come completely unraveled after this and we end up leading 10-1 after 5 and the series is basically over. Comeback from 3-0 down to win the series complete.

 

On to the championship now. Have to play the team with the best record in baseball now but no matter what I got my entertainment out of this season.

[Craig H]

Won all of my Diamond Dynasty games last night including a 12 inning game. Got one game in today and the dude would just fucking spam bunts whenever someone would get on base. When you're playing online, that's bullshit because the lag turns that into free runs. Dude was bunting even with two strikes. Finally, I threw a fastball at his hitters face because he was facing me for a bunt. The ball did indeed hit the batter in the face...and then the game froze. Game freezes don't result in a win or a loss. Good. Fuck that guy.

[Chaos]

Won all of my Diamond Dynasty games last night including a 12 inning game. Got one game in today and the dude would just fucking spam bunts whenever someone would get on base. When you're playing online, that's bullshit because the lag turns that into free runs. Dude was bunting even with two strikes. Finally, I threw a fastball at his hitters face because he was facing me for a bunt. The ball did indeed hit the batter in the face...and then the game froze. Game freezes don't result in a win or a loss. Good. Fuck that guy.

 

This is why I hate playing games online. People can't try to play the game with a simulation mindset.

[Craig H]

So the way Diamond Dynasty works is similar to something like Starcraft 2, if anyone is familiar. Basically, based on your performance, you're moved up to different leagues. In this case, it's Spring, SS (Season Series), DS (Divisional Series), CS (Championship Series), and WS (World Series). Last I checked the other day, only about 4 or 5 teams were at the CS level. I have moved up from Spring to SS and was progressing nicely to DS when the level of play hit a point where it's so fucking difficult. I basically playing other guys vying for a DS spot now, so it's much tougher than playing dudes at the lower or middle ranks of SS. If it isn't pitching that's tough to hit, it's the hitters who are so dialed in. I'm not even sure how it's possible. I don't feel as if I'm doing anything different when it comes to hitting, but I average maybe 2 to 3 runs a game. My opponents score like 5 to 7 runs. As for pitching, I'm noticing many players either assigning knuckleball pitches to their created player or having pitching rotations composed of knuckleballers. It's much more than a coincidence to face knuckleball pitcher after knuckleball pitcher. My theory is the usual cheap bullshit because the movement and speed on knuckleballs combined with latency make for pitches that are incredibly difficult to get hits off of.

 

It would be nice for people to not play like assholes.