Out of the Park Baseball 10 (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 8.0 (4.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Brett Todd
• Reviewed on: 07/17/2009
• Released on: 06/02/2009
• Originally published on GameSpot: Out of the Park Baseball 10 (PC) Review

For a game that's all about numbers, Out of the Park Baseball X is pretty true to life. What else can you say about a sports simulation that dishes out a few dozen stats about your clean-up slugger but also lets you know when his wife lands him on the DL after clobbering him with a frying pan? Little down-to-earth anecdotes such as this make the latest addition to this long-running baseball sim feel awfully human, giving you a few chuckles and making you feel like you're managing flesh-and-blood ballplayers rather than robotically tracking columns of ratings and statistics. The only criticism of this addictive treatment of the major leagues is that it remains daunting for the uninitiated, who still have to ascend a veritable great wall of stats without the aid of a tutorial when loading it up for the first time.

Nevertheless, the focus remains on a rigorous re-creation of professional baseball. OOTPX allows you to take over a ballclub located just about anywhere in the world and then interact with the greater baseball universe however you want. You can play solo against computer GMs, as a commissioner with total control over every team, or online in fantasy leagues with just about as many human opponents as you want. Most players will head right to the majors and take over a big-league franchise, but if your tastes are a bit more exotic, you can run clubs in all of the developmental leagues in the US and Canada, as well as winter league ball in such places as Mexico, the Dominican Republic, Japan, and South Korea. Or you can take a trip back in time and start a career at any point in the history of baseball, complete with accurate stat-tracking for the era in question. So if you want to see how good the 1927 Yankees really were, go for it. Detail is spectacular, if a little scary. Thousands of player and team stats track every action taken on the diamond during the season, while extensive player ratings let you scout prospects and veterans alike to get a handle on what they add to your lineups. "Comprehensive" doesn't even begin to describe the fantasy baseball world you can enter here.

But in many ways, OOTPX is more of the same. The above description could be used to describe many versions of the game released in the past decade that this franchise has been with us. This is a new coat of paint, not a renovation. Some of the freshening up is much needed, however. The most notable change is a rewriting of event scripts. Boring, sometimes typo-strewn text has been replaced with commentary showing you that players have lives beyond the numbers. League news and e-mail have been jazzed up with situation-specific lines, as well as additional player and manager quotes. Most of it is the same "We gave 110 percent" nonsense that the real pros fob off on the media in postgame interviews, which isn't exactly thrilling to read, though it sure is realistic. New injury reports are more colorful. While most boo-boos are the usual down-to-earth torn flexor tendons and strained rib cage muscles, in the offseason, players will bang themselves up in fights with the wife and even run from the cops. Different events take place on the field now, too. Brawls result in big suspensions. Players give media reactions to reaching such career milestones as hitting 300 home runs or winning 200 games. You can even follow history in the making through detailed e-mail updates about lengthy hitting streaks. Some of these situations have been recognized in previous versions of OOTP, but never with as much variety. As the seasons fly by, the all-new text keeps the game feeling fresh.

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