4/28/2006: Xbox 360: Major League Baseball 2K6

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Michael D

4/28/2006: Xbox 360: Major League Baseball 2K6

Postby Michael D » May 3rd, 2006, 4:17 pm

[QUOTE=fatheadX]

I think what bothers me most is they secured the exclusive rights and then put out this unplayable piece of crap.  It's proving to be the worst-case scenario the anti-exclusive crowd (which was everyone, really) was talking about last year. 

 

I got back into console gaming a few years ago because I was sick of the pain you had to go through to get a PC game running correctly.  Now with downloads part of the console scene, I believe game companies are rushing console games out the door, knowing they can fix them later.  This is bad, very bad.  Ideally, Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo will put their foot down and make it clear that this is unacceptable to the gamer community as a whole.  Games should be playable out the box, period.

 

If word gets out that MLB 2K6 is unworthy of purchase and most gamers do not buy a baseball game this year, I wonder how the licensing fees that go to MLB will compare to 2005?  I suspect that 2K Sports paid so much for the exclusive rights that MLB will still make much more than in years past.  I have to believe 2K Sports stands to lose some serious money on this deal if they cannot turn this franchise around quickly.

[/QUOTE]

I completely agree with you. It's kind of similar to how people feared EA would lower the quality of their football titles with their exclusive deal, although in this case, the nightmare has become a reality.  The one thing to remember, though, is that 2K did allow other companies to make MLB games this year (albeit with their permission).  Case in point, Sony with MLB 06: The Show for the PS2 and PSP. And the current gen versions of MLB 2K6 don't have problems as serious as the 360 one, so 2K still has a chance to stay in the green with their baseball deals.


Atarifever1
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4/28/2006: Xbox 360: Major League Baseball 2K6

Postby Atarifever1 » May 4th, 2006, 1:03 pm

[QUOTE=bluemonkey]

Well I haven't worked on a commercial software dev team.  My only experience is working for 2 months on a project with 7 other people and my dissertation this year which while not huge (probably around 10-12k lines of code) is still substantial for a single person, along with what I have been taught.

 

My point was that in the old days they dealt with simple code structure working at the low level with UML diagrams that any 1st year at uni could handle.  Whereas these days projects require hundreds of classes and dozens of modules.  The complexity comes from the interaction of all these parts and the interaction between staff.  The APIs take away the low level donkey work but don't help with the problems of interacting between all these different elements.  I mean in my project I have used very clear cut interfaces between the different stand alone modules and I still kept finding subtle bugs in their interaction.

 

There's a reason why the majority of all large pieces of software fail to even be shipped.  Bigger teams help in regards the volume of work but add in their own problems.

 

I never meant to make an excuse for them, I'm just saying you can't compare them to the simple games of the past.  I mean a lot of those old games are trivial to make.

[/QUOTE]
In any case, if it constantly locks up, shouldn't they have had some testers who figured that out ages ago?  This isn't like it only happens if you play game 26 in your season as the Blue Jays and you move Hinskey to second or something, this is a lock up in the second inning of a two player game.  Come on, did they not test it before shipping it out or what?  It doesn't take looking through a million billion lines of code to figure out a frequent problem occurs; it takes play testing a dozen times.   On the whole "playing your product before you ship it" aspect, I'd say it is fair to compare the biggest most complicated game you can find today to Pitfall.  Like I said, if the problem's that obvious and you sink a few million into the product, how can you miss it.  This isn't hidden somewhere deep inside the code and only appearing when the moon aligns just right with the sun, this is lockng up during basic gameplay.  Even old small games had hard to find glitches, but this one doesn't exactly appear well hidden.

bluemonkey1
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Joined: December 31st, 1969, 7:00 pm

4/28/2006: Xbox 360: Major League Baseball 2K6

Postby bluemonkey1 » May 5th, 2006, 7:50 am

Never once did I try to excuse this game.

 

I was responding to a comment someone made comparing the bug testing of current gen games with old gen games that is all.


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4/28/2006: Xbox 360: Major League Baseball 2K6

Postby VideoGameCritic » May 5th, 2006, 4:39 pm

[QUOTE=Atarifever]
In any case, if it constantly locks up, shouldn't they have had some testers who figured that out ages ago? 
[/QUOTE]

As much as I lambasted Take Two for this screw up, I can see how it might happen.  Apparently the lock ups only occur on hard-disk equipped 360's.  It's possible that the game was developed on a 360 without a hard disk.  It might have been a core system, or a special developer system made available to developers before launch.  Whatever the case, the Quality Assurance manager must have assumed it would run on a typical machine, which is a cardinal sin for someone in that position.

As to the actual story behind this, we may never know until someone involved decides to quit.  Right now I bet Take Two has everyone under lock-down not to speak a word of this.  They are definitely trying to keep a lid on this thing in order to minimize the damage.


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