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A tale of two teams: 1967 LA Kings® and 2016 Detroit Red Wings®

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Franchise Hockey Manager (FHM) 3 gives armchair GMs the chance to call the shots on and off the ice, whether they want to take over a modern day team or travel as far back in time as 1931 and take control of an NHL or WHA club. It’s a lot of fun, as OOTP Developments team members Jeff Riddolls and Adam B have shown during their weekly Twitch casts.

They’ve been alternating between two simulations, one with the 1967 Los Angeles Kings, an expansion club, and another with the 2016-17 Detroit Red Wings, who entered that season riding a streak of 25 straight Playoffs-bound years. We talked with each of them about their efforts.

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Trenton Thunder take OOTP out to the ballgame

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Minor League Baseball team the Trenton Thunder are the Double-A affiliate of the New York Yankees, and on July 4th, they helped celebrate the holiday by hosting an Out of the Park Baseball night at their ballpark.

Four lucky fans won copies of Out of the Park Baseball 18, and a good time was had by all as Trenton blanked the Reading Fightin Phils by a 2-0 score.

Take us out to the ballgame!

If you missed the event, you have another chance to have fun with the OOTP Developments crew on August 24, 2017, when Trenton hosts Hockey Night. They’ll be playing the Richmond Flying Squirrels, and OOTP Developments representatives will be on hand to give away copies of OOTP 18 and Franchise Hockey Manager 3, as well as show off the games at a table on the concourse.

Hope to see you there!

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Walking a fine line: GMing the San Diego Padres

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The ability to call the shots on and off the field for any Major League Baseball team is a huge part of the appeal of Out of the Park Baseball 18, so T.J. Lauerman, OOTP’s Baseball Community Manager, leapt at the chance to run a team on the game’s weekly Twitch stream.

He recalls: “Last year on the weekly Twitch streams, I had set out to turn the Atlanta Braves into World Series champions by 2020 and failed miserably. This year, I wanted to see if I would have better luck. I left it up to the fans and put a poll on our Twitter account with the options of the Chicago White Sox, Minnesota Twins, Cincinnati Reds, or San Diego Padres.”

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Acing a Marketing Class Project With OOTP

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Want to use OOTP in your class or after-school club, or know a teacher who would like to use it? We’re happy to provide free copies of OOTP for use in K-12 and higher education settings. Please get in touch via the OOTP Developments contact page.

Nearly everyone has been asked, at least once during their schooling, to come up with an idea for a project, execute on their vision, and present their findings to a class. Few, however, have done so with Out of the Park Baseball.

LaGrange College student Stephen Coelho and classmates Josh Garland and James Poropatic are among those few. Tasked by their marketing class instructor with creating a business or product and developing a business plan for it, Coelho says he “decided to get creative and set up an expansion team in OOTP,” bringing his fellow students along for the ride as part of a group project.

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Tales From the OOTP Multi-Verse: Contest Winners Find Themselves in OOTP 18

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What if you had a chance to see if a virtual representation of yourself could crack the big leagues, or even end up with a career that lands you in the Hall of Fame? Sure, you could do that in Out of the Park Baseball 18 by creating a fictional player with your name and tweaking his ratings to your heart’s content, but what if your virtual self ended up in every copy of OOTP 18 sold?

That’s what happened this year when five lucky winners in the OOTP 18 pre-order contest found themselves in the game as virtual prospects with a chance at baseball immortality. They were able to dictate the basics of their in-game player, including position, handedness, and age, height, and weight. We chatted with three of them to find out what they thought of the experience.

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Tips For Success With FHM 3’s Achievements

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Officially licensed by the NHL (click to enlarge)

Everybody loves Achievements! They add interesting wrinkles to many games, and their presence in Franchise Hockey Manager 3 is no exception. Available when you choose Path to Glory mode, achievements in FHM 3 allow you to tout your ability to do many things, from winning a minor league championship to emerging victorious in the Stanley Cup® Playoffs.

There are too many achievements in FHM 3 to list here, but we’ll cover the highlights, starting with  the toughest ones – and some tips for achieving success.

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GAF Online Baseball League Gives Thanks for OOTP

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A portrait of the commissioner as a young man.

Brent Long, commissioner of the GAF Online Baseball League that came together on the NeoGAF forum, discovered Out of the Park Baseball with last year’s version 16, but once he did, he was hooked. “When I play any game that tries to simulate a sport, I’m always most interested in the long-term development of my team,” he says. “You get to see what would happen if you were in control and, right now, OOTP probably does that the best out of any game that I’ve played.”

He joined the GOBL not long after its inception and soon became the commissioner. “GOBL brings me into the game every single day,” Long observes. “There’s a lot more intrigue when you know you’re competing against other people and not just the CPU.” (The league has a few openings, so anyone who’s interested in joining should see the thread on the NeoGAF forum and contact Long (he’s “brentech”) for more information.)

(click to enlarge)

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Overeducated Baseball League Mixes Highbrow and Lowbrow

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Nate Wooley in serious mode
Nate Wooley in serious mode

Some consider baseball the most cerebral of the pro sports, so it’s not a surprise that an enterprising Out of the Park Baseball player would capitalize on the idea with the Overeducated Baseball League. Consisting of fictional athletes playing in the Platonic and Socratic Leagues, with Kant and Hobbes Divisions in the former and Hegel and Calvin Divisions in the latter, the OEL has been going strong for ten years. There have been 20 simmed seasons completed.

“Yes, we’ve made all the ‘Calvin & Hobbes’ jokes,” OEL co-founder Nate Wooley says without being asked the obvious question. While that comic strip’s main character was fond of a game called Calvinball that involved rules created on the fly, Wooley is a stock broker and his fellow co-founder Mack is an attorney, so they’re sticklers for rules. [Read more…] about Overeducated Baseball League Mixes Highbrow and Lowbrow

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Franchise Hockey Manager 3: Top new features for armchair GMs

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Franchise Hockey Manager 3 is now available worldwide, so we thought we’d take it for a spin and highlight the major features that armchair hockey GMs have been anticipating the most. Like OOTP Developments’ other games, FHM 3 offers a deep, authentic experience that you can explore any way you want, from a day-to-day, nuts-and-bolts GM view to a “sim a season in minutes and watch a world unfold” commissioner perspective.

Here’s what you can look forward to. There’s much more than this, of course, so please visit the official Franchise Hockey Manager 3 page to learn more and get your copy today.

Officially licensed by the NHL (click to enlarge)
Officially licensed by the NHL (click to enlarge)

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