Leeds Mav

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Everything posted by Leeds Mav

  1. My favourite batter to play with was either Eric Karros or Eric Davis, can't remember which one, because he always held his bat upright with his hands at his waist rather than over the shoulder as nearly everyone else did ! I always seemed to get more hits with him. I didn't know too much about the intricacies of baseball at that time and it took me ages to hit the ball but I wasn't as clueless as the guy on this video, undoubtedly the funniest video I've seen for a long while [video=youtube;wEFaE-VshYI] By now computers were starting to be affordable to the masses and along had come Chamionship Manager 2, the real start of the successful long running Football Manager (FM) series I bought all of them from CM2 to the current day FM14 and they were great, they were football but they weren't very stat based just as football isn't. The stats don't really matter at the end of the day - it's all about the ball in the net. My first real breakthrough on a stat based sports sim came when somehow, I can't remember how, I discovered OOTP 6 / 6.5 I still didn't really know what I was doing as I experimented with a few online leagues but soon dropped out as finances, options, waivers and other things were a complete mystery to me. Gradually I learnt myself what things did and meant and by 2008 I was ready to take the step back into the online world. I flitted through many leagues, not finding what I was looking for. Participation was still limited in those days, forums were very impersonal and I was conscious of being quite a bit older than your average American online player. Eventually I came across the MBBA just re-booting with 1995. No fancy webpage just forums but the commish was good and the GM's were a solid crew. I stuck there and despite a few gaps I am now on my fifth franchise there in (game date) 2015. They required a certain amount of writing, a few paragraphs here & there, which helped in the immersion but at the pace of three 10-day sims a week quite often was to much for me. In 2010 I took the plunge and applied to get into a league I had always admired, the PEBA. I had always thought that the amount of creative writing was beyond me but with a bit of friendly coaxing from founding commish John Rodriguez I managed to prove I could do it and they became my main league. The forums there are immense and I learnt lots of previously hidden intricacies from the friendly forums which really are a community with over 81,000 posts to date. The slower pace of two 7-day sims a week helped me to produce better writing but even that was a struggle at times with shift work. I got my reward last year in my fifth game year in the PEBA when I won my first ever online OOTP championship This year, having taken early retirement in late-2012 and struggled with time management initially, I began to look for something different and found it I think in One Day at a time sims. The slow pace is perfect for me to slip some writing in and I find the chat box a wonderful thing. I was never a fan of instant messenger things as my time on the computer was generally limited, snatched in-between work, meals and sleep. A message always popped up as I was rushing off but now I answer to no-one I find the chat box great to dip in & out of. So that's my life story of sports video games which kinda degenerated into my ootp history lol
  2. [Part one - the early years] As an English kid in the 60's & 70's I had a very sports game deprived childhood. Our games of football, rugby and cricket didn't lend themselves so readily to card & stat games as your American 'stop start' sports did. I was always good at maths and loved stats so I would have really loved your stat games like Strat-O-Matic, but we had barely heard of the sports let alone the games replicating them. The best we could have on the video front was Pong Computers had yet to become personal and consequently I was in the later half of my twenties before I could afford an Amstrad 9512PCW a very basic thing that had an illuminated green/black screen and ran from twin 3"" floppy discs. It cost around £500 (about $800) and could do limited word processing plus after a fashion .... PLAY GAMES ! By now American sports had made their way onto our TV screens and we even played some of them, I was helping to run an ice hockey club in Oxford which for a fleeting moment actually signed Gary Unger at the end of his career but before he played a game he came to us and asked for his release as Peterborough were going to pay him more. Going back to the Amstrad it had an American Football game called 'Head Coach' which try as I might I've been unable to find any screenshots for the PCW but that whiled away many hours despite being basically dots moving around on the screen. All I seem to remember was that if I ran the 'reverse' play my dot always got pounded behind the line of scrimage but it was my first real introduction to stat based computer games without really knowing much of the rules of the game. Eventually consoles started to appear and I was finally able to get my hands on sports video games. The Sega Megadrive (called Genesis in America) was my first and my favourite game was the EA hockey series NHLPA Hockey, the best of which was the '93 version which even had blood seeping head injuries not in later versions as EA decided it might not be good for their image lol My first introduction to baseball had come around this time, just before the 1993 expansion. We had a channel that showed it live a couple of nights a week in the wee small hours and my first video game was MLBPA Sports Talk Baseball.