The mythology built up around Major League Baseball 2K is that the game could not do anything right. Eight-figure losses and terrible review scores every year are, yes, terminal deficiencies. But its pitching and hitting mechanisms forced the dominant MLB The Show to respond with weak revisions to its controls, and MLB Today — when it worked — was the freshest introduction in a main mode of play since the singleplayer career.
It drives me nuts every time I hear it. A professional athlete delivers a gobsmacking statistical performance, whether for a single game or a longer span, and a commentator or a columnist inevitably describes him as “putting up video game numbers.”
When I run my mouth about international soccer, I sound like a complete and total imbecile. When a Brit does the same thing about basketball, it is 100 per cent comedy gold.
One of the few broadcast features in Madden NFL 12 that I didn’t punch away with a quick button press was the official league bumper video at the end. You know, when the smooth narrator puffs up and says “This telecast is copyrighted by the NFL” and lays down the law of the league’s expressed written consent.
Last week, Kotaku reported strong evidence that at least one of the eight finalists in the million-dollar MLB 2K12 Perfect Game Challenge had used an exploit to substitute weaker batters into the opposing team’s lineup and have an easier time tossing a perfect game during the contest’s qualifying round.
To throw a perfect game, a single pitcher must retire every batter and at least 27 of them, in a victory. That we know. 2K Sports, in its “$US1 Million Perfect Game Challenge, on Major League Baseball 2K12, applies a formula to those games, rating their degree of “perfection” so to speak, according to factors like pitch count and strikeouts. Here’s what I didn’t know until now: You are also judged on the physical perfection of your pitched game.
By the end of October 2010, everyone knew NBA Elite 11 was doomed. Though officially “delayed” that September, one week before the game was due to release, no one really expected it ever to ship, even internally. The ambitious makeover of the NBA Live franchise simply had too many problems to be published. That last Friday of the month, word spread from EA Sports’ operations in California and Canada to Florida. NBA Elite would be canceled outright.
Though I wish I could say I was smart enough to think up this ruse in advance, I really did forget my backpack somewhere inside EA Sports’ Tiburon studio during a recent visit. This became an opportunity to roam all of its upper four floors of development, though not unescorted.
