Suh-Wing Batter! Out Of The Park Baseball 17 Released
Serious ballgaming
"And it's 'One! Two! Three strikes; you're out! at the old ball game!" They sing, and They are filthy rotten liars. Baseball has a great many more numbers than that, reams of statistics, waves of them, an ocean of numbers grinding down the shores of my brain. RBI, RC, RP, GPA, GS, HBP, SLG... but that's fine, because numbers and statistics make a fine foundation for the complex high-rise of Out of the Park Baseball, the sim-heavy management series. Our Adam is an OotP fan but he's still tied up in GDC tidying-up so hey, here's me to tell you Out of the Park Baseball 17 [official site] is out.
Don't worry, I know a thing or two about stickball too. I was an avid watcher when Channel 5 showed MLB games all those years back, following the Seattle Mariners for Ichiro's cheeky base-stealing and the Red Sox for Tim Wakefield's beautiful knuckleball.
OotP is a baseball management game, then, where you take control of a team and try to make them do sports well. Or you could play in historical leagues. Or create new leagues of your own and have them grow in a simulated way. Or fork history. Or... it likes to simulate unreal things as much as real ones, y'see.
The list of features new to this year's instalment includes MLB and MLBPA licensing for proper rosters and faces and whatnot, smarter AI managers, a redesigned interface, multi-core processor support for faster simulation, and generated portraits reflecting players' aging, emotions, and team changes. Go dig in there if you're a fan.
Maybe Adam will play and tell us what he thinks if we all honk ballpark organ tunes whenever and wherever we see him.
Out of the Park Baseball 17 is about £30/$40 on Steam or direct from makers Out of the Park Developments. It's on Windows, Mac, and Linux.
