The analogy our reviewer uses in his review of MVP 06 NCAA Baseball is EA Sports "making lemonade out of lemons." The college baseball game--EA's answer to being shut out of the MLB gaming license--is a tasty little drink indeed; a game meant not just for college baseball nuts but hardball purists as well.

　　In the end, MVP 06 has an uphill battle ahead of it--despite protestations from a hardcore contingent in the state of Texas, I suspect college baseball falls several rungs below women's figure skating on most folks' sporting radar (which means the coming Torino Olympics are bad news for the Lone Star State, I guess). As stated in our review, where the game misses the beat is in capturing the feel of college sports. Many collegiate conferences and big-name stadiums are missing in the game, and the MVP team still has a long way to go before capturing that obssessive and frenetic college atmosophere that's so richly conveyed in the NCAA Football series.

　　Of course, the good far outweighs the bad in MVP 06. The game does have the MVP engine powering it, perhaps the best baseball gaming engine in the industry today. And then there's all that EA Sports marketing muscle. If anyone's going to shove college baseball down gamers' throats, they're the ones to do it.

　　So, all in all, a fine start for the series. With all the jockeying for the MLB license last year, the future of the MVP development team didn't always seem certain. Those days are over... for now at least. Now that MVP 06 is out, the team can move on and set its collective sites on creating something in MVP 07 that takes college baseball to the next level, in much the same way its MLB series served the pro game.