After shaking off a line drive to the face, I finished out my rookie minor league year in MLB 12 The Show‘s Road to the Show with an unblemished record, 10-0 in about 16 starts at two classifications. The team still lost games I started but, somehow, they managed to at least get me out of the decision before doing so. My player was given the ball to pitch an elimination game in the first round of the International League playoffs.
There’s a reason coaches throw batting practice behind a screen: As the pitcher, you are first in line against a cannon firing a shell weighing about one-third of a pound, at nearly 160km/h. Ask Herb Score, the bullet line-drive back up the middle has ended and severely altered some promising careers. A line drive killed first-base coach Mike Coolbaugh, and that’s the reason all base coaches now wear helmets — as they do in MLB The Show.
As is well-known, the officiating in MLB 12 The Show can be set to a variable quality of accuracy. You can either have it perfect, or home plate umpires can have personal strike zones and tendencies, blow close plays and refuse to ring up hitters on a checked swing.
News and notes from around the world of sports video gaming:
• More than 629,000 perfect games have been attempted and 555 have been verified as thrown in Major League Baseball 2K12‘s $US1 Million Perfect Game Challenge, which has about 10 days left. Those numbers are the latest available from 2K Sports.
News and notes from around the world of sports video gaming:
Do little jugs get your attention? No? Well, how about the Song Girls of USC, or the Texas Pom Squad. Or a guy from Michigan staring up the crotch of Paul Bunyan. Trophies and university-specific cheerleaders are part of the coat of polish the NCAA Football 13 gang is applying to this year’s presentation. Details are teased in that video above.
News and notes from around the world of sports video gaming:
When you have done so much right for so long, to the point that very little needs to be changed, the paradox of your success is that what you offer risks becoming stale. For years, MLB The Show has been one of the most universally acclaimed video games, regardless of genre, and its improvements — while observable — sometimes feel like a world-class sprinter shaving hundredths of a second off his winning time.
• The world’s largest Tecmo Super Bowl tournament is tomorrow in Madison, Wis., featuring a field of 178 players. TecmoBowl.org also tells Kotaku that NFL Films will be present, apparently for a feature sometime later about video gaming and gridiron. The event will be live-streamed and live-blogged from TecmoBowl.org’s official tournament page. The action begins at 11am EST (US).
