Big Fish, Small Pond… (Or my regrets of MLB 09: the Show being the only baseball game worth playing)
A survival of the fittest maxim, that competition drives improvement, is true in life, sports, and even video games. Without Red Sox vs. Yankees baseball flounders and maybe dies a slow painful death from a chronic case of no one cares anymore. Without the Sega Genesis, the Nintendo would probably still be 8 bit, well maybe not.
Currently the videogame world has two major baseball games. Only one is worth playing, MLB 09: The Show. The other title, MLB 2K9, is like MLB 09’s kid brother. Its graphics are good but not quite as solid, the game play is nowhere near as tight, and the anemic franchise mode might as well not even be there. In other words, 2K9 needs to grow up a little, maybe in couple of years it’ll hit puberty and actually develop into a big boy game.
Nothing I’ve written here so far would surprise anyone who has played both of these games. The problem is, like Madden’s dominance of football, the developer of The Show, Sony Computer Entertainment San Diego or SCE San Diego, has no motivation to make improvements to the game. They just need to make a few minor tweaks and give the players new ratings. Then, in an embarrassingly addict like fashion, we come back for another fix. While too many unnecessary or poorly made changes would certainly lead to ruin, the game hasn’t been improved from last year’s incarnation by a large enough margin.
In a game advertised as “The Most Realistic Baseball Game Ever”, I’m tired of seeing guys run through first basemen like they can possess Whoopi Goldberg and have a hot interracial lesbian encounter. Overall the game’s mechanics are extremely well done, but there are a number of minor annoyances that begin to stack together to create a game a little less believable. For example, contracts in the Franchise Mode are unrealistically underpaid. The new base running control can be finicky. Also, the game doesn’t have single-A. I see the excess of having all the minor league teams but even the defunct MVP Baseball by EA Sports had single-A teams in the Franchise Mode. And, that was on the PS-2 so obviously storage shouldn’t be much of a problem. A little more depth in the game would certainly be a welcomed addition. Overall the game leaves you wondering, after making the improvements they did make, how SCE San Diego spent the other eight months waiting for the ’09 release date.
The Road to the Show Mode is a lot of fun still and the options will allow you to skip parts of the game that can be boring, such as fielding and base running. Even better, the options allow you skip routine plays and base running when you aren’t the lead runner, which greatly speeds up the games.
Bottom-line, The Show is the most realistic baseball game ever and a great game, but so was The Show 08. Therefore, the question is will The Show 2010 be much better? In a word, no. And, who is to blame The Show, 2K9, or people like me who keep doling out sixty bucks every year?
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