Out of the Park Baseball 2006

K. Fields
2006-09-10T20:45:17-04:00
Baseball

Things have been quiet on the baseball gaming front for some time. I finished up my last season of computer baseball in 2003. That was the NALB 2004 season. I was actually a year ahead in the fictional NALB universe. 2003 was the year that i switched to the Mac. I had Out of the Park Baseball 5 but there was no Macintosh version. Out of the Park Baseball 6 and 6.5 came out later and they were Windows-only as well. So I decided to shelve the league until there was a native Mac version of the game. I had plenty of other Mac games to keep me busy but I did miss the fun I had playing OOTP Baseball.

A lot has happened with OOTP Baseball over the last three years. The company became part of Sports Interactive. SI was in turn acquired by Sega. The best news of all was that Out of the Park Baseball 2006 was released this spring for both Windows and Mac. The Windows version debuted on May 31 and the Mac version was released on June 6. I purchased the new Mac version the day it came out.

Unfortunately, there were some growing pains. The original download had a problem with the license key. It also had a problem importing my old league from OOTP Baseball 6. The import would cause the game to crash every time. Thankfully, several patches have followed the original release. Version 1.03 was released on 9/1/06 and it is probably going to be the final patch for OOTP 2006. The developers will be starting work on OOTP 2007 shortly. With the latest patch installed, I am now ready to begin the NALB 2005 season. I have been progressing through the preseason and so far this version seems pretty stable.