MLB '06 The Show
Score: 90% ESRB: Everyone Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment America Developer: Sony Interactive Entertainment America Media: UMD/1 Players: 1 - 2 Genre: Sports (Baseball)/ Online
Graphics & Sound: I've decided that baseball, like golf, has now achieved that rare state of being more fun in videogames than in real life. Okay, you can't quite substitute the PSP version for your beer, hot-dog and franks, but everything else is as good or better than the real thing. MLB '06 The Show is epic, realistic baseball action on PSP. EA has generally stolen the show with sports games that bore a scary resemblance to TV broadcasts. This time, Sony gets its game on with a first-party title and scores big. The player character models are very convincing and the stadiums are perfect. Replays add a nice touch, but can be skipped over. The actual design of the interface is clean and easy to use, and navigating the online piece is seamless. "The crack of the bat," remember? You can almost smell the peanut shells and franks and stale beer in this game, but we've not reached olfactory realism just yet. What does provide a great dose of realism and add to MLB '06 The Show is the in-game chatter and announcing. The actual play-by-play coverage is great, but the so-called "color commentary" by Dave Campbell and Rex Hudler is awesome. There's nothing like whiffing a ball and hearing, "Well it's no surprise this team is losing..."
Gameplay: It seems like deep sports titles are easy enough to come by, but deep is sometimes the enemy of accessible. MLB '06 The Show manages to balance between the two, which is marvelous. A game that anyone can pick up and play, MLB '06 The Show also reaches die-hard baseball fans who want every bell and whistle imaginable. With five standard modes, you can pick your style of play and get into the game quickly. Exhibition is a quick-play, one-game mode that is also present online. Pick a team and play, basically. Career is the deepest and allows you to do everything they do in the Majors, including Spring Training, trades, picking lineup and deciding before each game who will play. The range of options here is dizzying. Home Run Derby and King of the Diamond are even more compressed than Exhibition. In these modes, the point is just to knock as many balls over the fence as possible, or move men around the bags and score runs. What really stands out about MLB '06 The Show is the online mode. Not only is the online component of the game easy to access, but it allows you to join games against real players over the internet. There are also options to subscribe to news feeds and read them on- or offline. One of the coolest features is that you can refresh or update team lists according to how MLB is actually organized. These latter features are going to appeal to hardcore fans who like the intense realism, but the ability to go online and play makes this a game you can really get some mileage from.
Difficulty: Difficulty in a game like MLB '06 The Show is really a function of how much you feel comfortable doing at once. Since baseball is a team sport, the developers had to pull major strings to let one person do the work of eight. If you like pitching, catching fly balls or line drives, throwing to base and tagging out a man stealing home, you can control all that here. You can also set most of these to automatic and just handle pitching or batting. Beginners will want to start this way, and I don't like how many options need to be changed to "dumb down" the game for more casual players. There should have been a simple "Easy" setting that just modified settings behind the scenes until a player was ready for more. What is very easy to modify is the setting for pitching and batting. On the easiest settings, pitching and batting rely on a well-timed button press, and not much more. In more advanced settings, it is possible to do everything from custom pitches to predicting where the ball is going to go and adjusting your swing before the pitch.
Game Mechanics: Again, simulating the work of eight is not easy. Controls are not intuitive, but over time, you'll learn your way around the controller. One nice thing I haven't thought of before was that the button layout on the PSP is a natural diamond shape! So, calling plays to tag out runners or direct long heaves from the outfield is easy. Just envision the button config with X as Home base and you'll never go wrong. The pitching or batting options are displayed on screen to guide you, so the hardest thing is generally remembering how the systems work while you're trying to time your swing or get the power just right on your throw. Just about every single button on the PSP comes into play at some point, so the hardest thing for new players is just remembering what they all do. Luckily, the control set-up is intuitive. Navigating the online system is fairly easy, but what MLB '06 The Show provides is almost a mini-browser. Reading news is a cool feature, but I wonder how many people will really take advantage of this. What is really smart is the option to download news and read it later. Commuters or school bus riders will no doubt appreciate the chance to take their baseball along for the ride. If this is the baseball game to beat, I can't wait to see what comes next. The online features seem richer than anything on offer right now, and including the option to update teams to match current MLB rosters, it's hard to see MLB '06 The Show as anything but bulletproof. If you even have a passing interest in the Great American Pastime, do yourself a favor and pick this up.
-Fridtjof, GameVortex Communications AKA Matt Paddock
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