Well, this game has been weighing on me for a while. I bought it back in 2012 along with the Vita version because of the cross-save functionality. I thought being able to play my season on the go as well as on the PS3 was a novelty I could not pass up. It was pretty cool. But I found this game to be somewhat hard and it didn't really keep my attention. I did spend enough time with it to create all the fantasy teams from 2012 and I did play about 10 games. This morning I woke up, updated the my fantasy roster (while leaving the other teams stuck in 2012) and began a season. I was not going to spend a ton of time on this so I made it a 14-game season with 1 inning games. Man, lots of pressure. Every pitch could end the game. It was actually pretty exciting. Anyway, I played 5 games that season and simulated the rest. My Athletics won the West, Colin's Twins won the Central and Stan's Rays won the East. Kristina's Tigers took the Wildcard. Anyway, Kristina's Tigers tried their best but could not bring me down. Stan's Rays failed to get a W off me in the ALCS. And then I took on the Mets in the WS with Lucas Duda hitting in the three hole (this is the result of all the fantasy teams being in the AL). I took the Mets down easily and won the World Series. I would have figured there would be an awesome animation of the players holding up the trophy. I wanted Edwin Encarnacion to get that, even if it was just in a video game. But alas, the animation was the same as every other game. It was disappointing.
Gameplay is good, but it didn't feel quite as good as MVP baseball. Moreover, this game is super hard. The pitches come in really fast and I couldn't even make contact for the most part. The good thing is that this game has sliders. You can control pitch speed from the option menu before starting the game. You can increase the rate of contact for humans and computers separately. Basically, I was able to make this game much easier. Though it still felt somewhat difficult, it was a lot better. I think this game does a pretty good job at baseball (much better than anything other than MVP). Still, my time with baseball video games is probably over.
MVP Baseball just came at this perfect time in all our lives when we were too young and bored to do fucking anything else. I remember the J-Train playing/simulating like ten seasons' worth of games and being more pumped about signing A-Rod than winning the championship every year. I remember Colin tracking his Pujols homers on white lined paper after the game stopped keeping track for him somewhere around the 127th game. I remember bringing Mark Buehrle into the 8th or 9th inning with a perfect game like 5 or 6 times and never quite getting there. This was before things like "achievements" so I have no idea why it meant so much to me. Personal pride? Again, we had way less else to do when we were 15 or so.
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