MVP 06: NCAA Baseball is the fourth edition of the baseball video game series developed by Electronic Arts. Because of Electronic Arts' loss of the Major League Baseball (MLB) license to Take Two Interactive in 2005, which now has the exclusive MLB license, the publishers decided to transition the MVP series to feature NCAA baseball, joining the publisher's NCAA football and basketball lines. MVP 06 was released on January 18, 2006 for the Xbox and PlayStation 2 consoles. The athlete on the cover is former Texas Longhorn David Maroul. Changes to gameplay While MVP 06 offers several large changes to gameplay in batting and fielding to reflect the switch to the collegiate game (aluminum bats, fielding by collegiate players), pitching remained essentially unchanged. Also, MVP 06 offers the player an option to change hitting and fielding to "classic" mode, reverting the controls to those of MVP Baseball 2005. Load and fire batting MVP 06 offers a brand new method for controlling the batter called "load and fire" batting. The player takes control of the batter's body by pressing and holding a button to lift the hitter's leg at the correct time so the hitter can use his hips to rip into the ball. Precision throw control The game also features a new precision throw control. Players use the right analog stick in order to throw the ball to the bases. If a player holds the button too long, he can overthrow the base, and if he does not hold the throw button long enough the ball could fall short, likely causing an error. Create-a-Ballpark mode In addition to the features mentioned above, the game has also improved the "create-a-ballpark" feature. The player can set the distance and height of the walls, as well as the surrounding backdrop, the field surface, and the size of foul territory. It could be convenient to MVP Baseball 2005 fans that there are preset walls that resemble those for all Major League ballparks, but instead of mentioning the parks' names, the selection involves the names of the cities. Reception The game was met with positive reception upon release. GameRankings and Metacritic gave it a score of 77.98% and 76 out of 100 for the PlayStation 2 version, and 77.61% and 75 out of 100 for the Xbox version. The A.V. Club gave it an A−, stating that "the mini-games are awesome, especially the batting challenge,