The last of EA's MLB games was its best, without a doubt. MVP Baseball 05 brought all of the polished gameplay of the previous years while including 2 fantastic minigames and a time-sucking owner's mode.
It took the monotony of a 162-game season and made additions to get you through it.
The gameplay was great. I'm going to keep it simple because we all know how a baseball game should play. This one played the way it should.
The owner's mode was a carryover from Madden's owners modes. However, in the Madden games, you were only dealing with your team. In this game, you were dealing with minor league teams which meant that if you wanted to, you could manage an array of talent across all skill levels. The multiplayer franchise mode was back and it's a shame that it's not in every sports game. A common practice for Brad, Tych, and I would be to fantasy draft our separate teams and then simulate the season making our own free agent picks to see how we would do. It was excellent and made us feel like managers.
The minigames put MVP over the top for me. I've never been good at sports gameplay. So, when EA added in a couple minigames that were addictive and forced you to learn the hitting and pitching controls, it ended up benefiting me greatly.
The hitting game had you striking BP pitches to whatever area of the field they wanted you to. If you hit it to that area, you got a bonus. The pitching game had you locating specific pitches to tiny areas of the strike zone to clear out colored blocks and get you big points. They both served no purpose, but were insanely fun and made me better at the game.
Unfortunately, because of 2K's move to monopolize video game baseball (which was caused by EA's move to monopolize video game football), there hasn't been an EA MLB game since. Let's hope that'll change in the near future.
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