MLB 08: The Show

March 12,2008 - As the off-season and spring training come to an end, it’s time for gamers to get excited for the upcoming season with the latest round of baseball games. Exclusive to Sony’s systems are the MLB 08: The Show games, which have the luxury of being able to be refined for this year instead of being reworked like MLB 2K8. The result is a great game of baseball that gets all the little things right.

The PS2 version of MLB 07 was obviously the team captain of the trio of versions, but for MLB 08, it has taken a back seat to the PS3 and PSP versions. Getting the least amount of tweaks of the three versions being offered this year will make PS2 owners feel a bit out of the loop, but the new features the game did get are the right ones that it needed. The new features in MLB 08 are an improved Road to the Show mode, the new analysis tools, the progressive batting performance, and some all-around refinements that shows that PS2 owners aren’t getting a raw deal here.

Last year, the Road to the Show mode proved to be an addictive new mode that concentrated the career mode to focus just on your player, though it had a few small bugs and downsides that have been addressed for MLB 08. The coach now gives more variety in goals during games and can even ask for defensive adjustments for double plays and such, but now you can earn points afterwards based on what you did in the game and for continuing streaks. While that may sound like you’ll be swimming in points to upgrade attributes, the points have been toned down overall so that you don’t become a godly player by the end of your first season. The greatest new change are these new examination goals, where your superiors ask you to reach statistical and attribute goals in a certain number of series for a chance to move to a starting position or be called up. Also included in the franchise and season modes, the progressive batting performance feature gives your players a boost to their attributes when they get hot or detract from their attributes when they’re in a slump.

The rest of the game has not really been changed much at all, unlike the Road to the Show mode. You still have the deep franchise mode along with the season, manager, and other modes you’d expect to see. Online still plays a huge part in MLB 08 with leagues, a new matchmaker system for finding good opponents, MLB news, and the great weekly roster updates and slider downloads that nobody else seems to be willing to try out. Once again, PS2 and PSP owners of MLB 08 can interact with one another, as they share the same online servers.

If terms of how the game itself plays, MLB 08 will feel right at home for anyone that has played MLB 07. The pitching is still meter-based, but with the addition of arrows to your cursor, you can now have more precise pitches now that you can see how pitches will break in mid-air. Batting sticks to the tried-and-true formula of using the cross and square buttons to bat instead of analog sticks, like MLB 2K8, but it still feels like an accomplishment to knock homers out of the park or hit the ball down the line for a double. Fielding has a few tweaks to allow for pressure-sensitive throws and a better gauge for robbing homeruns, though Road to the Show players will notice the ability to move before the pitch, which was a much needed gameplay tweak. Base-running is still pretty much the same, but feels a bit tighter, so that the player responds to you quicker than it did last year. Overall, the gameplay feels great, like you have total, and precise, control over the players, which makes up for not moving ahead to analog controls like MLB 2K8 has done.

While everybody raves about the visual advancements that the next-gen sports games feature, the PS2 still does a fine job of looking good, though you won’t be getting the more life-like representations of the players that you can get on the PS3 version. The game still features the great presentation that most have come to expect from the game, with some new dialog added in to keep things fresh. The menus have even gotten a good makeover, so now that they feel a bit more simple and intuitive all around.

MLB 07 was quite possibly the best sports game ever, in terms of the commentators, and MLB 08 doesn’t do anything to change that. The commentators don’t repeat often, which plagues most sports games, and they often have insightful or interesting things to say, which adds greatly to the presentation that the game has. The soundtrack is on par for baseball games, with some classic and modern rock and a little hip-hop in there, but if they’re not your kind of thing, you can turn off songs in the jukebox portion of the settings menu.

While MLB 08: The Show doesn’t change much from its predecessor, it’s still a great game of baseball in an era of sports games where competitions tends to hurt the products gamers are forced to deal with. Though the PS2 version didn’t require any major changes, the changes to its PS3 and PSP counterparts show that baseball fans with a PS3, PS2, or PSP have no reason at all to buy anything but Sony’s game this year. With a dearth of features and tweaks that make this experience the best out there, gamers will have plenty to do before and after the first pitch of the season.

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