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Who says you have to grow up? Here at SI.com's Game Room, our staffers review the latest sports video game titles to hit the market and welcome your feedback.
  
2/09/2007 03:57:00 PM

MVP 07 NCAA Baseball Review

MVP 07 NCAA Baseball Review
Electronic Arts
By Lang Whitaker

A few weeks back, EA Sports rolled into Manhattan and set up shop in a midtown high-rise in order to display and promote the games they're scheduled to drop over the next few months. Many journalists were crowded around the Nintendo Wii playing Tiger Woods Golf, while even more journalists were crowded around the open bar and the waiter carrying a tray of curried chicken puffs.

Myself, I was there for much more noble reasons: To play college baseball. Last year, after EA Sports lost the license to produce Major League Baseball video games, they went out and snapped up the rights to a collection of colleges and made their long-running MVP Baseball series a college game. There was little fanfare surrounding the release of MVP 06 NCAA Baseball, but I took it home and found myself enthralled. Finally, perhaps for the first time since RBI Baseball on the Nintendo, I'd found a baseball game that came close to approximating the soul of baseball.

For those of you who aren't gamers, you may think video games by their very definition are soulless; simple burned discs of plastic carrying an endless series of 0's and 1's which somehow translate into a series of images on our TV screens. This is understandable, though video games -- at least the really good ones -- absolutely have something there more than just images and sounds. In my opinion, this is what differentiates ultra-successful games like Grand Theft Auto, Halo and Madden from all the series that imitate them. If you play video games, you probably understand what I'm talking about.

The thing that made MVP 06 so wonderful was that it hit a perfect balance between being rough around the edges and making the gameplay technically challenging. All of the MLB games that dropped last summer were commonly glossy and shiny, the players universally sharp polygons, the stadiums all hard surfaces and polished ends. MVP, conversely, had real college stadiums, like Stanford's Sunken Diamond, which came with shaggy grass and faded foul lines. The players in MVP weren't big muscle-bound brutes but were softer and rounder. The game being available solely on the PS2 somehow added to its pragmatic feel.

Where MVP really shined, though, was in the controls. Instead of relying on the buttons like every other baseball game, MVP 06 shifted the controls to the analog stick. Swinging the bat required swinging the analog stick backward and then forward in time to connect with the pitch. Playing in the infield meant using the analog stick to throw to a base, although winding up and then throwing the ball while nailing the timing was much harder than it seemed.

Of all the video games I played in 2006, from sports games to war games, I'm pretty sure I logged more time on MVP than any other game. This is partly due to MVP's intuitive gameplay, but also because of the game's imminently replayable dynasty mode, where you takeover a college, controlling everything from your starting rotation to your recruiting. You can simulate weeks at a time, but you can also easily jump in at any point and take control of your team, making it simple to zip through a season while keeping an eye on your boys.

MVP 06 was the best baseball game released last year, and saying that it might be the best baseball video game ever made shouldn't be considered hyperbole. So when MVP 07 hit my grubby hands this week, I was stoked. I convinced my wife I was tired and would be falling asleep on the couch, and once she went off to bed I hopped up, grabbed the game from my bag and fired up my PS2. And for the next few hours, I immersed myself in a haze of peppy fight songs, junior college transfers demanding playing time, the ping of aluminum bats and Rosenblatt Stadium. MVP 07 is largely the same game as MVP 06, which makes wonderful sense: It wasn't broke, they didn't fix it. Thank goodness.

The big change this year is what EA is calling "rock-and-fire pitching." In MVP 06, the only facet of the game that required serious button mashing was the pitching. Now the pitch delivery has for the most part been transferred over to the right analog stick. It's not easy to grasp, but once you comprehend it, pitching is more fun than it was last year. In fact, the motion required with the stick to throw a successful curve ball actually feels like you're bending a pitch at the batter.

The lone strike against MVP 07 is that it's available only on the PlayStation 2, which, in this day and age of forward-thinking technology, seems a little backward, like building one of the greatest cars of all time but limiting it to 35 miles per hour. I won't complain, though. I've still got a high school senior in Texas who wants a full scholarship and a promise that he'll start as a sophomore to deal with. What is he, crazy?

Ratings System (1 to 10)
Game Play: 9.8
It's difficult to stress how much fun it is to bat using the analog stick, trying to read pitches and poke them to the appropriate fields.
Graphics: 9.8
By making this a PS2 game and purposely limiting their technical options, EA has set the stage for the game to be a little less than perfect, which, it turns out, is perfect.
Replayability: 10
As I wrote in the review, the dynasty mode in the game is ridiculously addictive. Just give it a shot -- you'll see what I mean.


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Comments:

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Posted: 7:11 PM, February 09, 2007   by Anonymous
Can't wait to play it!
Posted: 12:18 AM, February 10, 2007   by Peter from Milwaukee
First off, well done with an RBI Baseball reference. In my opinion, the benchmark for all baseball games. So, your endorsement that it falls in that line makes me highly optimistic.

I was really disappointed when EA lost the rights to produce MLB games. They really were on the right track with the MVP series. To hear that the College series is that, and then some, makes me excited about this game.

Thanks for a great review!
Posted: 11:30 PM, February 10, 2007   by Anonymous
MVP '06 was available on both the XBox and PS2.
Posted: 6:43 PM, February 11, 2007   by Anonymous
MVP 06 was available for the Xbox, too...
Posted: 12:10 AM, February 12, 2007   by Anonymous
This article is true to form of video baseball as whole and as MVP being the elite baseball game. The irony for me was using a team a friend of mine was on, that was a nice thrill. The realism is good, the ONLY down side to College Baseball is nobody knows who the players are until they reach OMAHA, and then, it only last as long as their team is in. MVP base on PS2 emulates The College World Series perfectly. It is the greatest gem that most people don't take the time of day to get to know, and they should. The PS2 still proves it's strenth even after the XBOX-II, PS3, and Wii systems are out. Now if only the MADDEN tournament would get it right and have a PS2 championship division. They must not want me to win it all ;). Statistics show, the PS2 is still the most popular system by far. If you love the nuances of baseball at the smaller levels and want a new way to appreciate the great game of baseball, get MVP, you won't regret it.
Posted: 8:39 PM, February 13, 2007   by Anonymous
How biased and full of it can a review get?
He rates this game almost a perfect 10 when the average game ranking is a 76% or 7.6/10
http://www.gamerankings.com/htmlpages2/937092.asp?q=mvp

In fact the closest anyone comes to his score is an 85% from PSM.

He doesn't even mention that last year's game (MVP 2006) had the rosters for the previous season.
This year, EA did something different. They did not update the rosters, nor did they simply plug in the rosters used in last year's game. Instead, they completely mixed them up in this manner: the roster of the team ranked #1 in last year's game (Texas) was simply transferred to the team ranked #1 in this year's game (Oregon St.), and so on down the line. So, for example, if in MVP NCAA Baseball 2007 I choose to play as the Ole Miss Rebels, I will in fact be using a team made up of the players from the 2005 Alabama Crimson Tide.

The mind boggles.
Posted: 10:27 PM, May 24, 2007   by Anonymous
mvp 07 really made me mad because it doesn't have Carolina gamecocks stadium. Neither did 06, I won't buy it any more if it doesn't get sarge frye field in south carolina
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