Thursday, February 26, 2009
News Player's Club: MLB Front Office Manager review
Posted by Garrett Martin on Thu, Feb 26, 2009 at 6:50 PM
MLB Front Office Manager
Rated E for Everyone
Released Jan. 26
Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC
Published by 2K Sports
Apparently the M in MLB stands for menus. That’s my take-away from MLB Front Office Manager, at least. The game’s a great idea strongly undermined by indifferent execution. I'm a crazy baseball fan, with an all-consuming obsession for both real and fantasy baseball. I’m so single-minded during baseball season that my amazingly patient wife can now talk about park effects and VORP and ERA+ like a hardened sabermetrician. She’s convinced my irrational anti-Jeff Francouer ranting is going to give me an aneurysm some day. I'm passionate about baseball, so I was both excited for and disappointed by MLB Front Office Manager.
As a baseball simulation, MLB Front Office Manager should aim to do one thing: replicate the experience of managing a major league baseball franchise as realistically as possible. On the surface the game does a fine job, offering up all the bits you’d expect: the Rule V draft, national and international scouting, contract renewals, free agent signings, payroll and roster management for both the major league team and all four minor-league affiliates, etc. All that fine-print, lawn-tending stuff is there, and, in theory, it’s completely awesome. Hell, it’s actually quite addictive in execution, at least for this unreasonable baseball fan. Still, there are some major flaws, some of them huge enough to make me depressed and angry over the amount of time I spent playing it.
MLB Front Office Manager’s greatest failing is that it’s not even remotely user-friendly. A game based entirely on data should have a quick and easy way to sort through information. MLB FOM's menu system lacks any shortcuts. You’re almost always two menu screens away from whatever information you need. Want to make an offer to a free agent? You’ll have to go to the transaction pull-down menu, open the free agent menu, enter another menu to set the parameters of your player search (only by position or overall rating, not by name), select the player, and enter another sub-menu to make an offer. That’s five steps, on top of however many it took you to back out of whatever menu you were in to begin with. It’s a frustrating waste of time.
The game’s unwieldy, unintuitive, and straight-up mystifying in most regards. Let’s go back to that free agent example. Once you’ve made an offer, you’d think the player’s agent would respond with his thoughts on the deal. That doesn’t happen. You never hear a word from a free agent unless he’s accepting your offer or signing with another team. So you have one chance to sign a player, and the AI behind those decisions is unfathomable. One free agent signed a deal for less money than I offered, without a word of explanation. Another time I traded for a quality outfielder, only to see every stat decrease substantially by the end of September. His OPS was at .850 when I acquired him two-thirds of the way through the season, but it finished at just under .700 barely two months later. MLB Front Office Manager fails to keep players informed of pivotal developments until it’s too late, while also making incomprehensible decisions.
Not to pile on here, but the game’s economy is also thoroughly unrealistic. I played as the Braves’ general manager (of course), and unlike Frank Wren, I made a good faith effort to resign John Smoltz. He still refused every offer I made, even when they were almost the exact terms he requested. The Cincinnati Reds signed Chipper Jones, Atlanta’s perpetually injured 37-year-old third baseman, to a seven-year, $25 million per season contract, as soon as he became a free agent. That’s not just a ridiculous contract completely divorced from any fidelity to the current baseball economy, but also entirely impossible, as the real Chipper Jones’ contract with Atlanta runs through the 2009 season. A game primarily concerned with contracts should know when those contracts end, but MLB Front Office Manager consistently strikes out on such details.
MLB Front Office Manger is the sort of game where the people who'd most love it are the most likely to hate it. And yet, I quickly became addicted to it. I seethed every time the game failed me, but the core experience just barely satisfied me enough to keep playing. I’d hate to see how much time a well-made baseball simulator would suck out of my life, and yet I’m also perversely excited at that prospect. Here's hoping 2K Sports sticks with the franchise and realizes its potential.
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