All Gaming is Role Playing

The key to understanding video games, I think, is to understand that all gaming is role playing. Even in games that aren't role playing, the degree to which you can really sink yourself into a believable environment through your tv screen, and achieve things greater than what you could ever achieve on your own, is the core of the video gaming experience.

I love traditional role playing games of all stripes. I adore the classic Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series, along with other classic RPGs like Breath of Fire, Chrono Trigger, Lufia, Suikoden, etc. I also love more action RPGs like the Mana series, Diablo, Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core, and others. But perhaps my favorite kind of RPG is the sports RPG, which is basically every sports game out today.

The whole notion of a sports RPG can perhaps be traced all the way back to Tecmo Super Bowl. In Tecmo Super Bowl, you not only had the ability to play a game between two teams, but also to play an entire season as one team! This seems silly now, but to 6 year old me, it was completely revolutionary. (Note: there probably is some title, likely a baseball one, that featured this gameplay feature before, but Tecmo Super Bowl is the first game in which I experienced this concept, so I'm running with it, much like Bo Jackson). Now you were not only placed into the shoes of your team for a game, but you were literally running the team. You chose what plays to run, which players to focus on, and the team of your choice. What's more, your season wrote a mental story in your head, in which you were the central character, as play caller, general manager, and player. You could take your lovably losing team to the Super Bowl, or you could ride Bo Jackson to the Super Bowl. Your talented team could flounder against an opponent over and over again, and you develop a rivalry that's entirely in your head. This escapism is true role playing in every sense, with a well developed combat system that happens to have the rules of football.

While I have played hundreds and hundreds of hours of these kinds of games, always in a mode in which you can captain a team through several seasons, or a player on his meteoric rise to the hall of fame, one recent title stands head and shoulders above the rest as the premier sports RPG...MLB: The Show (many apologies to my beloved Madden, MVP Baseball, NBA Jam Tournament Edition, NBA 2K, and especially the NCAA Football series). The Show is a Playstation exclusive sports title that simply does everything better than the rest of the sports competitors out there. It's main strength is that there are very few moments in which the spell of role playing are broken for you by poor presentation or mechanics. I'll give a few examples, and counter them with Madden or NBA 2K ( series that I enjoy, but are frequently spellbreaking).

First of all, the graphical presentation is flawless. In Madden, you'll frequently see super weird looking people on the sidelines, or have people walking through each other, or weird graphical glitches. This is partly because football has so many interpersonal actions (where one player's body collides with another), whereas baseball has only tags (basically). But everything looks fantastic. The swings look authentically like the real players, as do the pitchers' deliveries. The faces are about as realistic as you could hope, and the ball behaves in predictable ways when it leaves the pitcher's hand, or the bat.

Second, the commentating is FANTASTIC. You never get tired of hearing the commentating, and they never hear completely ridiculous statements from the commentators. For example, in Madden, my brother-in-law and I had a dynasty with the Redskins, and we had won about 7 Super Bowls in a row, and Robert Griffin III had about 7 MVPs in a row. And still, EVERY time we would start up a game, the commentators would come on and say something about how RGIII had won a Heisman trophy at Baylor...are you kidding me? Or in NBA 2K, your guy can be scoring an average of 20 points per game, including shooting 40% from 3, but if you hit a 3, they'll still say "you don't expect that guy to hit that shot". WHY? By contrast, the commentating is fantastically adaptive in MLB: The Show. One time, I heard the commentators discussing the how the ivy is finally starting to change colors due to the change in seasons at Wrigley Field. That's right, they programmed a line of dialogue, and had the announcers record it, for a game in Chicago, in a certain month of the year. That's a level of dedication I've never seen in a sports game.

Finally, The Show gets the quirks of baseball just right. Madden and 2K are very easily broken. You can identify an abusable strategy that will get you 10 yards a play, even on All-Madden. Each Madden has these strategies, and so offense typically becomes a cakewalk to a touchdown, for those with enough practice. Further, the abusable strategies are generally modified each year due to nerfs to particular tactics, but this often times takes the randomness out of sports. For example, in one year of Madden is was super easy to block kicks. I'd block about 80%. But in the next year, they'd change it to make it impossible to block kicks, to the point that if you intentionally had the center run away from the line and leave the center of the line completely wide open, the defensive line STILL wouldn't block it. The Show, on the other hand, has random things happening all the time, and it feels like the AI adapts to your tactics. For example, I had a guy drop a pop fly one time. In about 1000 games played. If Madden had programmed that, it would have been happening never, or every other game. But The Show's inclusion of that 1/1000 chance makes it so that you never take anything for granted. The AI also prevents you from abusing strategies. If you pull the ball all the time with your hitter, the AI will start playing the shift against you. Alternatively, if you focus on slapping the ball to the opposite field, the pitchers will start to pitch you inside. If you stink at hitting the curveball, they throw more of them. I can't actually confirm that the AI is making these adjustments. But I can say that The Show FEELS so real that if feels like I truly am a character in the game, and that the computer is watching my games, scouting me, and trying to figure out alternative strategies to neutralize my approach at the plate.

Anyway, if you've never played The Show, and you like baseball, you now have no excuse. You need to go get it. It is, in my opinion, the greatest baseball and sports game of all time, and I actually have played a ton of sports games. I'd give it a 10/10.

-TRO