It’s that time of year again! Sony has just released their latest baseball game, MLB 09 The Show, and it’s time to find out, does the show hit a home run, or does it strike out? Well read on and find out! Ill basically be breaking this review down just like any other, by that I mean I’ll be breaking it down and examining each of the main points of the game.
The Unique thing about the MLB Show series has always been its story mode aka “Road To The Show” where you create a player, designing every little detail, from the eye size, to how many wrinkles are on your forehead! While the selection of hairstyles is somewhat limited, it is a definite step up from last year. Once you get into it though, RTTS (Road To The Show) is quite addictive, and has tons of replay value, the sheer amount of options they give to you may seem overwhelming at first it adds greatly to the simulation value of the game, you can use training points to improve your skills, and if you want to keep up against the competition around the league you’ll definitely need to. Franchise mode is pretty standard, but it has just about everything you could want from a franchise mode but as stated above, Road To The Show is where this game shines.
Next up is the sound and audio part of the review, and let me start off by saying that the sound track for this game won’t be winning any awards, but that’s not what we play baseball games for anyway! I’m not saying the songs are terrible, while a few of the songs do feel like they fit in, there are some songs that just feel like they just grabbed them out of nowhere. Now let’s look at the other side of the sound spectrum, the In-game sounds couldn’t be better, they really nailed the baseball stadium presence in my opinion, and even the different sounds of hitting the ball, and bats breaking, seem really well done. All in all, id say the Audio and Sound in this game is pretty solid, while it won’t be going down in video game history or anything, it’s definitely solid for a sports game!
Alright, now onto one of the big selling aspects of any next gen sports games, the graphics is one of the many areas where MLB The Show excels at, and while I haven’t played MLB 2K9 yet, I have to say from the videos and screen caps I’ve seen, The Show seems like it’s the better of the two in terms of graphics. The players are smooth, the sky, grass, and stadiums all really show the power of the PS3. The only real gripe I have with The Shows graphics, is that some of the animations can seem a little odd at times, and sometimes as with any game, there are slight graphical glitches, such as one I’ve encountered a few times, the bat will actually go through the players shoulder, however I should not that I have not seen that last glitch since the last update, so they may have fixed it.
Lastly, we’re going to take a look at the online mode, as of the time of this writing, the online is pretty laggy, sometimes it can be hard to get a decent game in, but I’ve had times where my online games have played almost flawlessly. Online games can either fly by or sometimes almost be as long as a real baseball game, or at least SEEM like it! As far as disconnects go, I haven’t actually had one yet, but I’ve heard that the person who disconnects, of course is given a loss, which is a fair enough system to use. Online is pretty solid, and it would definitely be one of my favorite games to play online, if they would just fix the lag issue!
All in all, MLB 09 the show is a massive improvement from last year, and while there is still a lot of tweaking and work that could be done to it, especially in the online department it’s definitely one of the best baseball games I’ve ever played. After MLB 2K8 I had just about lost faith in the genre, but this game was able to restore that and make me look forward to the next installment and who knows, maybe they will release some DLC for this one as well! I would strongly recommend this to any baseball fan, this game is a solid purchase and well worth the price paid for it!
Gameplay
Graphics
Sound
Overall
