Out of the Park Baseball 13 and iOOTP 2012 Impressions - RaychelSnr's Blog

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RaychelSnr's Blog

Out of the Park Baseball 13 and iOOTP 2012 Impressions Stuck

Posted on April 2, 2012 at 11:47 AM.

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I've gotten my hands on both iOOTP 2012 and Out of the Park Baseball 13 thus far and here are the first batch (albeit brief) of my impressions of both games.

Out of the Park Baseball 13

I love the new interface. It's taking some getting used to, but I honestly feel as if I'm playing a much more mature version of OOTP. Everything is located a bit better, but you simply have to relearn where everything is.

For instance, a lot of your relevant menu items are now icons on the right side of your screen. It's all there, you just have to know what you are looking for.

I haven't gotten a chance to dive into the game fully, but I definitely feel as if I'm about to be hooked again. I started a career with the Royals and I'm already running into money problems. My beloved Rangers are no longer as fun to play with as I like building teams rather than maintaining their success. But perhaps it's time I give that a go as well.

But I digress.

I did test simulate awhile and just see what happens in terms of the storylines and such in a test career. There were some interesting choices to be had, as I had to balance a players needs vs. the team's chemistry plus fan interest, plus the players potential and ratings. This is the type of stuff that makes OOTP great.

I haven't dived in to the real-time simulation mode, but you can bet that'll be a topic for tomorrow.

iOOTP 2012

I'm going to be more in-depth of iOOTP 13 in the coming days leading up to its launch in the App Store. My first impressions are the game loads faster between menus and the menus themselves are still quite good.

Right now you are greeted to a much simpler interface on your home screen, with options to manage your team and to check in with what's going on with the league. Both of these options open up numerous other menus, but it's nice to get rid of the clutter and to simplify your workflow a bit.

Just as with my OOTP experience, I'm going with the Royals to try to give winning as a small market franchise a go.

But the one thing this year's game does do is speeeeeed. It has lots of it. Just as I said a bit ago, the menus are faster, the sim engine runs faster, and it seems as if the game itself is more efficient with the iDevice resources.

As with OOTP 13, you'll be hearing a lot more from me on iOOTP 13 this week!

Comments

# 1 ajaxab @ Apr 2

I'm really looking forward to this version of OOTP. I've always felt like OOTP was more of a sandbox where one could create a customized, personalized baseball world and then watch it run from afar. However, the in game experience was somewhat lacking and the players were still a set of numbers.

I think the storylines feature could go a long way in dealing with that issue. The sandbox aspect of the sim will still be there, but more details about players and how they act in different situations could give some more (virtual) flesh and bone to the collections of numbers they seem to have been in the past. I'm intrigued to see how things play out once the game gets released.