
	Platform Playstation 2 Genre Sports Publisher Electronic Arts Developer EA Canada ESRB E (Everyone) Released February 7, 2007

- Solid baseball title, even without the allure of a Major League Baseball license - Outstanding pitching controls bring a heightened level of realism to the gameplay

- Who are these guys? Unlike College basketball and college football games, most gamers won’t have any level of familiarity with 99.99% of MVP 07 NCAA Baseball’s players - Missing the presentation flair of EA’s other sport titles

Review: MVP Baseball 2005 (PS2) Review: MLB '06: The Show (PSP) Review: Triple Play Baseball 2002 (PS2)
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MVP 07 NCAA Baseball

Score: 8.0 / 10

Every spring and summer, the distinctive “pinging” sound of aluminum bat meeting hardball can be heard throughout the fields of the nation’s college baseball fields. And if you play Electronic Arts’ newest baseball title, MVP 07 NCAA Baseball, it’s a sound you’ll become intimately familiar with.

When it lost out on the Major League Baseball license to Take-Two’s 2K Sports, EA looked for a replacement baseball franchise. Since it already had a college basketball and college football game, it seemed only natural that EA pursue the sitting-there-for-anybody-to-claim-it college baseball license. EA applied its MVP gaming engine that had been a hit with the MLB license to college baseball. While it’s not the same good old ballgame that EA possessed when it had a MLB game, MVP 07 NCAA Baseball is a solid baseball game in its own right, relying more on good controls and fundamentally excellent gameplay that the glitz and glamour of high-end visuals and presentation values.

Although it really doesn’t look like much, with a so-last-generation animation and visual performance that only a drunken frat boy could find attractive, MVP 07 NCAA Baseball isn’t worried too much about being a campus pretty boy. It instead relies on outstanding controls and playability to attract baseball gamers.

At the plate, you have few choices as to what control schematic you will use: a Classic Swing that EA baseball-gaming veterans may prefer; the newer Load and

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Fire batting mechanisms, where you literally load up and unleash a hopefully well-timed swing that will ping the ball right over the outfield wall; or even Zone Hitting.

It’s the pitching controls of MVP 07 NCAA Baseball that are even more impressive in their level of accurate complexity. It isn’t easy hurling the ball, especially to batters armed with aluminum bats, waiting for just the right time to take one of your offerings

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from the pitching mound and sling it into open spaces.

When you’re pitching, the camera shifts to an over-the-shoulder view, giving you a genuine on-the-mound sense of really being part of the game. Not only do you have to select your desired location point of your pitch, you need to pick a pitch from your arsenal, and control a target and pitch cursor that determines how effective your pitch will be once you rock back and fire it toward the plate using the all-new analog controls. Pitching is 90% of the game, or so the saying goes, and it’s true in MVP 07 NVCAA Baseball, because if you can’t pitch effectively, you’re going to have a tough time winning.

Lacking a major league licensing agreement hurts the allure of MVP 07 NCAA Baseball, because you have to be totally hard-core to even know who even an inestimably small percentage of these players taking the field are. There are those out there that certainly are hard-core enough to have recognition of college players in the broader-appealing college football and basketball titles from EA, but college baseball simply does not have that same level of familiarity. I’d wager there’s even college-attending gamers who may play MVP 07 NCAA Baseball and couldn’t even name two players that actually suit up for their current higher-learning institution.

There are some customization options available in MVP 07 NCAA Baseball, and a few varying modes, including some mini-games, but none are very deep, particularly considering how engrossing some other EA Sports titles suck you into their vortex of all-encompassing season and career modes.

It looks strictly bush league and doesn’t have a MLB license (that actually may appeal to the sports-gaming masses that have grown tired of the supposedly juicing, steroid scandalized “heroes” of the majors), which in turn leads to you failing to recognize the majority of the players taking the MVP 07 NCAA Baseball fields. But despite that player acquaintance factor, with a great baseball-playing control setup, MVP 07 NCAA Baseball is a solid hitting title that will stay entrenched in the gaming lineup of baseball-gaming fans everywhere.

- Lee Cieniawa

lcieniawa@armchairempire.com

(May 15, 2007)