| Front Page Sports Baseball Series | |
|---|---|
| Developer(s) | Sierra |
| Designer(s) | Dynamix |
| Genre(s) | Sports, Simulation |
| Mode(s) | Single player, Multiplayer, Career |
Front Page Sports Baseball was a series of baseball games created by Sierra / Dynamix in the mid to late 1990s. It remains popular as a simulation engine for online leagues.
Contents |
The first edition was Front Page Sports: Baseball '94 for DOS.
This was followed by the release of Front Page Sports: Baseball Pro '96. Released on 30 June 1996
Front Page Sports: Baseball Pro '98 was released on 31 May 1997 introduced the customizable pb.ini file.
The game had good graphics for its time period. These improved with each release but stayed true to the Sierra format. In batter/pitcher mode, the view was 2D and when the ball was in play the game switched to 3D mode. Team colors could be adjusted, but there were no logos on player uniforms.
Despite its sophisticated physics engine, the game's graphics did not measure up to the baseball games released at the time by EA Sports. The game's strength was its statistics engine, support for career play, and roster management. Each team holds 50 players. 25 players on active roster, 15 in AAA, and 10 in low minors.
The game was never strong as a first-person arcade style game. As one review states "But just as with Sierra's Football Pro games, arcade-style play is not this game's strong point. The graphics, at least from the batter-pitcher perspective, are certainly decent - until you notice there's no option for a pitcher-batter perspective, and that, with the exception of skin tone, all the players are generic in the way they look, the way they step up to the plate, and the way they swing."
"On the up side, you do have a nice variety of managerial options available in the hands-on mode, as well as extensive control over pitching (type, location, speed) and batting (type of swing and area to look for the pitch). The game looks and feels a lot like real baseball - the animations are dead-on without looking canned and the ball physics seem to be about right." [1]
The game also featured many ambient sounds the add the baseball experience. WAV files were used to add crowd noises, cheers, boos, pop corn vendors, hecklers etc. The game opens with the Star-Spangled Banner, and during the 7th-inning stretch, Take Me Out to the Ball Game is also played. As a special touch when playing in SkyDome or Olympic Stadium, Oh Canada is played.
The graphics were not a concern for serious fans of the game. At the height of its popularity, there were dozens of online leagues, and many took up the task of writing utilities for the game. Shaun Sullivan (of PureSim Baseball 2007 fame) and Rudy Kaman are among the many utility writers that made the game easier to play. There were also a few websites devoted to discussions on better tweaking of the pb.ini file.
The pb.ini file is a standard windows configuration file. Each section has an impact on game play. Some physical factors cannot be altered in a ridiculous way however. For example, there is a section to alter pitch breaks, but you cannot create a "bugs bunny" change up or an unrealistic curveball. But the file can be tweaked it so that a pitcher could throw 200 mph or cause a batter to hit the ball 1000 feet. Turf resistance and bounce can be altered; as well as the effect that altitude and temperature has on gameplay. The wHow a pitcher would pitch based on the count, and game situation. All of the player related factors in the pb.ini file use the player's ratings or a percentage of them based on the corresponding entry in the pb.ini file. Most factors have a base number, then a percentage of the player's rating was added to this base. Here is how bat speed is calculated.
swingspeedbase=70 swingspeedPHpct=30
This means that the bat speed for a player with a 0 PH rating would be 70 mph, a player with a 99 PH would have a 99.7 mph swing (99/30). This method also applies to pitch identification, run speed, catch chance, and so on.
This file gives the game ultimate control. However it was not until recent years that some of the file's impact on the game was clearly understood. Some entries are still not understood completely. Most were learned through trial and error.
The popularity of the game has waned for many reasons. The first blow came when Sierra abandoned the series. The next major issue was the games incompatibility the newer operating systems entering the market (Windows XP). The game would crash upon finishing a game on NT based systems.
The limited ratings scale of the players continued to be an issue, as this made it difficult to accurately emulate real major league baseball players. The fact that all players were only assigned 5 ratings limited the nuances of real baseball. These ratings controlled: contact(CH), bat speed(PH), run speed(SP), fielding ability(FA), Arm Strength(AS). Missing skills that could have enhanced game play would have been ratings for batting eye, base stealing ability (since not all fast runners can steal bases, and some slower runners are very good base stealers), fielding separated in to throwing accuracy, catching ability, and range, bunting.
Additionally, the games internal player creation engine gave power hitters an unfair advantage in their ratings. Hall of fame players like Wade Boggs and Tony Gwynn were only given respectable CH and very low PH. This was because the game assigned CH based on batting average and not a better method like balls in play or strikeout rate. The game also based its ratings on a specific baseball seasons which had some effect on ratings. Early after the games released, this was a common complaint, because while these players excelled in real life, their counterparts in the game suffered. Conversely, the counterparts of power hitters dominated because the game usually have them a higher CH rating then deserved and this combined with their higher PH rating made the results obvious.
Gamers eventually determined that although players like Boggs and Gwynn did not hit many home runs, they did have a respectable bat speed and required a higher PH rating than they were given, this was balanced by giving them a high G/F ratio that resulted in that player hitting more line drives than fly balls. As a result there were many user created formulas for determining player ratings that would work better in the game. This discovery extended the life of the game for many leagues. In recent years, additional modifications to the pb.ini file has resulted in more affective use of contact hitters.
Pitchers only had the ability to feature four pitches in game play, there are pitchers in real life who feature five and sometimes six pitches.
There were also several bugs that interfered with gameplay at times. One issue was an injury bug that would cause teams to lose several pitchers in a row on consecutive pitches. But most of these limitations did not cause gamers to lose affection for the game, it was more a victim of time as is the case with most computer games.