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.

On the PS3, MLB 07 was a bit of a slip-up, being late to the gate with a game that was a bit buggy and had the overall feeling of a lacking port. Luckily, with a full year behind them, the developers have come away with a game that feels like it belongs on the PS3. Besides the obvious improvement in the graphics, MLB 08 features an improved Road to the Show mode, custom soundtracks, in-game saving, and some all-around refinements that shows that this version of the game is not a second class citizen.

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 player creation tools are now really deep, allowing you to tweak the smallest facial features before moving on to spring training. 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. It’s a nice addition that gives you great feedback when you’re still in the minors, instead of your superiors ignoring you in MLB 07.

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, though oddly enough, the King of the Diamond is absent from the PS3 version, but can be found on the PS2 and PSP versions of the game. 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. Outside of modes, you can now create your own soundtrack by picking up to 53 songs from your hard drive to listen to while navigating menus, but it would’ve been nice to be able to pick songs for your custom player’s intro music, as well. The other nice feature is that during games in the season or franchise mode, you can save mid-game so when something comes up, you can save and come back later when you have time to finish the game.

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.

The visuals were probably the biggest letdown in MLB 07, but MLB 08 rectifies that with what is easily the best looking next-gen baseball game out there. The players look sharp and vastly detailed, with great animations that echo the gameplay’s sense of control. If your player doesn’t look like he’s prepared for that ball, he’s likely to drop it for that reason. Load times are rather long, maybe upwards for ten to twenty seconds or so, even after the 1 GB install that occurs when you first play the game. The fans even look alive when they reach for foul balls, bat beach balls around, and leave during blowouts. The stars are probably the only downside to the graphics, as guys like Manny Ramirez just don’t look like their real life counterparts, while others may look dead on, but that tends to be the norm for this year’s games.

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. Taking advantage of the space that Blu-ray offers, MLB 08 features a ton of dialog that doesn’t repeat nearly as often as most other sports games do, which adds to the great sense of presentation that the game has. The soundtrack is on par for baseball games, with some classic and modern rock and a little hip-hop, though with the custom soundtrack feature, you can make your own soundtrack and not have to worry about what the developers put in the game.

When it all comes down to it, MLB 08: The Show is just an amazing game of baseball in an era where a lack of competition tends to hurt the games that sports developers put out. Making up for last year’s late-to-the-party lackluster PS3 version, it’s now apparent that anybody with a PS3, PS2, or PSP has 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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