If you're anything like me, March not only brings the promise of Spring Training and a new baseball season right around the corner, but also a spate of brand new baseball video games to feast on. Of course, it seemed like this excitement would be lessened when 2K Sports brokered an exclusive 3rd-party contract with MLB in 2005, marking the death knell for EA's fantastic MVP Baseball series (at the time the greatest baseball game ever made), but from a vaguely monopolistic deal for 2K came an opportunity for Sony to step up to the plate and make the best darned baseball series in the history of gaming.

Now, not having played it I can't speak to this year's 2K offering, Major League Baseball 2K10, and I won't belabor the point of how mediocre past renditions of that series have been, so this review is solely about MLB 10: The Show. I'll try to compare it to past versions of itself, and also to a real game of baseball, and try to avoid any derogatory comments about 2K's product, but I will mention as a disclaimer that I traded in MLB 2K9 last year for 2K's other (vastly superior) baseball game, The Bigs, in which you can hit 1,000-foot HRs... and found The Bigs more realistic. So while I can say I'm not exactly a Show fanboy, there may be some bias toward them simply by default, given that their only competition has been so lazy and lackluster by comparison over the past 5 years. But at any rate, let's press on and talk about this year's version of The Show.

In case you're new to the world of baseball gaming, The Show's mantra has always been to deliver the most realistic replication possible of our national pastime, and to that end their attention to detail is rather obsessive (which I mean in a very good way). The first thing I noticed when I fired up the PS3 version is that the numbers of the back of the jersey have their own textures now, and that's just one of the myriad tiny graphical improvements MLB 10 made from last year, including some new fielding animations, check swings, and even the ever-comical sight of fans along the baselines diving over the wall to try and snag foul balls. Of course, these are minor cosmetic changes to a game engine that remains largely unchanged from last year's offering, but this is one instance where the developers justifiably took an "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. Only small tune-ups have been made to the core gameplay elements, and a lot of small improvements are sometimes better than a sweeping change.

As has been the case over the past few years, the game delivers a near-perfect imitation of real-life baseball. The heart of any baseball game is the pitcher-batter interface, and few games have ever gotten this aspect of the game close to being right -- the High Heat series prided itself on that, and MVP was starting to escape borderline arcadish action in favor of pure realism, but the ability to work the count and think like a real hitter or pitcher has always been a weak point for baseball games, dating back to the first entries in the RBI series. And this is perhaps the one aspect of baseball that The Show captures the best, which is saying something in a game that's compulsively realistic. AI pitch selection is a spot-on mimic of the real thing: they will carry out specific strategies with different hitters over the course of the game, and adapt if necessary based on the adjustments you make. The same goes for AI hitters who will sit on certain pitches if you fall into a predictable pattern. The default pitch speed is extremely realistic as well -- not too fast or too slow, but just the right speed to know that you have to make a split-second instinctual call about whether to swing or not.

That's part of why the game's controls needed to be (and are) so intuitive. I will compare to 2K for a moment when I mention that people hold up The Show's scheme as somewhat archaic vs. 2K's right thumbstick-based actions, since it seems like a semi-valid complaint (after all, EA was basically using The Show's meter-based pitching back in MVP 2003). However, it's another case of not needing to fix a feature that wasn't broken to begin with -- The Show could have introduced a right-stick pitching system, for instance, but it would likely have been buggy, counterintuitive, and would have taken key development time away from the rest of the game (recall that 2K introduced right-stick pitching 3 versions ago and are just now beginning to work out the bugs). Sometimes simpler is just better.

Then again, that's not the approach The Show has taken when it came to game modes, as they continue to offer a ridiculously deep array of options for gamers of any type. That being said, not a whole lot has changed since last year -- franchise added some minor tweaks (trade AI is better), you can now play Home Run Derby, and Road to the Show famously added a catcher mode that allows you to call games, but for the most part it's the same (admittedly engrossing) menu as last year. Road to the Show is essentially a game unto itself, and if you thought last year's version was tough, this year you don't even get a spring training invite, you start at AA and have to work your way up, and some of your goals will still be extremely unreasonable. But it's also still a great way to lose yourself for hours at a time, and there's the welcome addition of new training drills for pitchers and fielders, one of the most glaring omissions from MLB 09.

Presentation-wise, The Show looks as fantastic as ever. As I mentioned, they always seem to add some little element of real baseball into the atmosphere of a game that makes you say, "Wow, these guys are really obsessive about detail!" Animations are fluid, the player models (while a tad blocky) look great for the most part, the batting stances & pitching motions are pretty realistic copies of their real-world counterparts, afternoon games will transition shadows in real-time, and the game just looks like a broadcast presentation. This year, the game also breaks in a new, wider fielding camera angle which takes a little while to get used to, but is a good addition and really shows off the graphical capabilities of the game. In terms of sound, the play-by-play from Matt Vasgersian is good, though Rex Hudler and Dave Campbell don't add much (and Hudler's comments are particularly irritating, especially when the game repeats them over and over). That's clearly an area where The Show lags behind 2K, as the Gary Thorne/Steve Phillips combo in 2K9 was probably better than this year's Show team. But the rest of the audio presentation is strong, from organ music during warm-up pitches to ballpark-specific chants.

As far as online play goes, Sony acknowledged that last year's Show was basically unplayable over the 'net and took a lot of steps to try and fix the bandwidth issues that slowed down gameplay and made timing swings and pitches nearly impossible. The early results are a mixed bag: it's better than it was last year, but still difficult to time things as well as you can in single-player. Having said that, the game has only been out 2 days, so improvements will almost certainly be made and bugs will be ironed out. That means we'll have to give MLB 10 an incomplete here for the time being.

All in all, the total product is extremely immersive. It's as true to baseball as any sports game has ever been to the game it's trying to represent, to the point that it makes NHL 10 -- heretofore the undisputed best sports game of the season -- look somewhat weak by comparison (and don't even get me started on Madden and NBA 2K10)... The bottom line is that if you own a PS3, you really owe it to yourself to get this game, because it's almost certainly the best baseball game ever made.

PS3 Grade: A+

Now, you may be wondering about the PSP version, which I haven't really touched on yet. So far, it's essentially the same game as last year's, with the notable absence of online play. I was not a big fan of online in that version either, but I do wonder what that means to those of us who relished the live roster updates throughout last season -- live rosters came via the Sportsconnect platform, and in the absence of infrastructure mode I have to wonder where, or even if, PSP gamers will be able to get roster updates throughout the 2010 season. If they eliminated that aspect of the game, MLB 10 on the PSP must be viewed as a colossal disappointment, since the game basically went unchanged (without all the minor improvements of the PS3 version), and there's no online play any more. I mean, $40 is a lot to pay for a glorified roster update that can't even be updated in-season.

At the same time, though, the only comparison against which MLB 10 for PSP falls short is last year's version and its big brother on the PS3... The gameplay is still great, it still offers a number of options like Season Mode and RTTS, and it's a pretty decent approximation of the PS3 rendition that you can take with you on the go (it will accompany me on the plane to Boston this weekend, for instance). So how the PSP version is judged will ultimately depend on where you're sitting: if you own last year's game, and if roster updates and/or being able to play online are important to you, it will probably be a disappointment; but if you're new to the game or you simply want the latest version of a handheld baseball game that goes above and beyond anything I ever thought I'd see in a handheld baseball game, it's worth checking out. I just continue to hold out hope that they'll make roster updates available via the Playstation Network...

PSP Grade: B-

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.