Welcome once again to PCGamesN’s Spotlight on Greenlight, our regular Saturday feature where we look at the best and the most interesting Greenlight games that are hoping to make their way onto Steam. We’ve already looked at dozens of other titles in weeks past, so do take a look at our back catalogue.
You’d like to be Brad Pitt, right? I mean the man’s in Fight Club, Twelve Monkeys, and Snatch. He’s a tough cookie. Not only do you want to be Brad Pitt, you want to play him in his hardest role, where he was the roughest, meanest person under the sun. Yes, when he managed a baseball team in Moneyball.
Well, with Out of the Park Baseball you can, my friend. We just have to get it through Greenlight and onto Steam.
Out of the Park Baseball lets you hop in and take control of any of the current season’s teams and try and take them all the way to the Super Bowl (I warn you now that my limited knowledge of sports may become obvious as we get further into this Spotlight). It’s the deepest management sim around and that’s reflected in the fact that it’s the second highest rated PC game on metacritic. That’s the second highest rated PC game of all time.
Head on over to metacritic and you’ll see the only game to have been scored higher on average than Out of the Park Baseball is Half Life 2. That’s a little ridiculous sounding. This game is as good as management sims get. Heck, with a rating like that, it’s clearly one for non-management sim players. Simply to try it out and see what all the fuss is about.
You’re provided with a database full of all the players playing in the current season. Each player is detailed with stats that you can use to organise a team capable of trouncing the opposition in game after game.
The depth of the game comes across in some of the different options you’re presented for playstyle. You can either keep things simple and only take control of the trades and contract negotiations or you can go right down deep into the game and dicate game strategy, controlling each pitch play.
The developer’s catering to players who want to just get started with playing and also fans who have been following the sport for years. This is evident in the different leagues they offer. You can start a game that draws its rosters from a database of current players, essentially letting you play out the season and compare your team against those playing at the weekend in real life, or you can pick from historical leagues. Any season from 1871 to the modern day can be replayed. Those aren’t played in isolation either, you can potentially play a team from 1871 all the way up to 2013, with players appearing in the roster on the dates that they actually joined the sport.
You can even bring teams out of retirement against their present day counterparts. The example Out of the Park give is importing “the 1927 Yankees and 1969 Orioles into the 2010 Major League and see how The Babe does against Josh Beckett.” (I’ve only seen the first Babe film. I’d no idea that he joined major league baseball in Babe: Pig in the City.)
The nerd that controls my emotions tells me I’m thrilled at the fact that the game’s stats are easily accessible at any time and that they go deeper than you’d hope. You can track each hit a player has made in every game they’ve ever played. This lets you, for instance, see how they’ve performed over a three-season run and use that to compare them to other players when it comes to trades.
It’s a little ridiculous.
One endearing feature is the ability to add to the chronicle of your league’s history. As well as playing the games you can write game recaps and articles that will be stored alongside the statistics and procedurally generated news clippings.
Out of the Park clearly has a place on Steam and it’s bizarre that Valve haven’t supplied it considering its metacritic rating. You can help it earn its place by giving it an upvote on Greenlight.