OOTP5 - For Old Times' Sake

[Antonin]

This past weekend I loaded the free version of OOTP5 onto my computer and started a new historical game. MLB from 1947, with me taking over the Cleveland Indians, my home town team.

I already have OOTP5 on a flash drive, with a couple of leagues I have been playing on and off for years. But I wanted to install it on the PC, just for old times' sake.

So far, Bob Feller and Red Embree are my stand-out starters, as one would expect. I've put Larry Doby into a couple of games, with mixed results.

I love the simple graphics and basic stats of OOTP5, and I adore the radio icon that appears in the play-by-play screen. Baseball on the radio! There are few things in life that are better. I remember being a kid in the late 1960s, walking to my grandmother's house in summer. Every other house had the radio on in the backyard, and I could follow the progress of the game as I walked.

It's fun to return to a computer game that brought me so much joy back when my life was much simpler. Back before words like "cancer" and "Alzheimer's" became regular parts of my family's daily conversation. Back when I made a good living, before my career was outsourced to India. Back when my wife and I could spend Saturday mornings in late spring going to the garden center to buy flowers to plant, and then go to the mall for something she wanted, and then stop and buy some bagels on the way home, and be home in time to catch at least the last few innings of an Indians game on TV.

I remember very clearly the Saturday when we went shopping and I found Season Ticket Baseball at some mall store. That led me to OOTP5 and, well, years later, here I am.

Playing OOTP5 made me remember the way things were.

Strangely enough, the OOTP5 sound works fine on my Win 7 computer. In previous versions of Windows, the game would always crash when I tried to play it with sound.

[Jerry Helper]

This got deep. Hope things turn out all right for you!