MVP 06: NCAA Baseball

MVP 06: NCAA Baseball was my first full title. I was very excited about sinking my teeth into a game and doing something big. But when EA lost the MLB license to Take Two, the initial reaction by EA was to change as little as possible, including the online feature set. I was bummed and I fought it: I wanted to do something bigger. I was asked, ”Like what?”

Dee Jay and I locked ourselves in a room with a legal pad and started brainstorming. We dreamt up everything from streaming music to a Baseball MMO. Personally, I was less interested in big, bold features than I was in ambient technology. I was frustrated on MVP Baseball 2005 that the developers never used the online feature set, so bugs would go unnoticed for a long time. I wanted to make it impossible for people to play the game without going online. I wanted to put online everywhere.

We had some good ideas, but none of them were great, until we heard about the pending deal between EA Sports and ESPN. This gave us ideas for content to go with our tech ideas. Instead of streaming music, I suggested we could stream the ESPN Sports Updates that you hear on the radio. And not only would the ticker be present throughout the game, but it would have ESPN stories in them. We took it to our EP (Brent Nielsen) and our LP (Ben Brinkman) and gave us the green light.

Because it’s so danged cool, let’s start with ESPN Integration, which requires that your machine is online. Thanks to new technology that EA has dubbed “Online Everywhere,” you will be privy to all the latest scores, updates and ESPN.com headlines, which are displayed seamlessly on the familiar ESPN scrolling ticker at the bottom of your screen. Each time you boot up MVP, the game will silently log on, and the flood of sports information will begin. That means while you are knee-deep in Dynasty mode, you can read “Mularkey resigns; Levy back to Bills’ sidelines?” or “Angels, city of Anaheim begin name change trial.” Online Everywhere is the next logical step forward as more and more gamers take their consoles online.

As if this weren’t enough, every 20 minutes the latest edition of ESPN Radio Sportscenter queues up and Buzz hits you with all the latest scores. These are the live broadcasts from ESPN Radio and you’ll never hear the same thing twice. For sports nuts, ESPN Integration and Online Everywhere are dreams come true and the first great online innovations of the year, pleasant surprises from a current-gen title. — Jonathan Miller, IGN 1/13/06

The big news is a different online feature, ESPN Integration, which uses your network connection to run a live ESPN news ticker along the bottom of your screen as you play. This is a wonderfully ingenious way to increase the sense that you are experiencing an actual baseball game, and to keep sports aficionados satisfied. — Charles Herold, New York Times 1/21/06