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 PSP, MLB 08 seems to be surpassing its PS2 brethren as the big counterpart to the featured PS3 version, as it’s receiving many of the same new features and tweaks as its next-gen brethren. What’s new here is 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 something you should sneeze at. Unfortunately, there are a few things that hamper the game, not necessarily by its own hands, but because of the system it’s on.

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. 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. 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. Outside of modes, you can now create your own soundtrack by picking up to 53 songs from your memory stick 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 on PSP last year or any of the console versions this year. Pitching is still meter-based with these new arrows around the cursor to show the break of the pitch, which gives you more of a chance for precise pitching. Batting is still button-based, so you choose to hit for power or not while trying to guess the pitch for an advantage in the pitcher-batter duel. Base-running is largely the same, with a little tweaking for better control over the runner. Fielding has gotten the most tweaks with the ability to move around before pitches in the Road to the Show mode and a better gauge for robbing homeruns. While this all sounds great, keep in mind that the analog plays a big part in hampering precise batting and pitching, though not enough to keep you from doing well.

Being on the PSP, MLB 08 doesn’t look as good as its console brethren, but it still looks good in its own right. There’s a distinct lack of umpires around the field and the ball can be a bit hard to track when it reaches the outfield, but it doesn’t become too much of a problem once you get used to it. The active fans of the PS3 version are gone, replaced by what are pretty much cardboard fans, but that is an expected cut. Load times are probably the biggest detractor, being well over a minute on average, so it won’t be the most efficient game to bring with you on trips. Once you get into the game, it moves quickly enough and even gets back to the menus much more quickly than it takes to get back into another game.

While commentary would obviously be much better for MLB 08 on the consoles that can hold much more audio in their storage medium, the PSP version of MLB 08 isn’t a slouch. Taking advantage of the limited space that the UMD offers, MLB 08 still features a ton of dialog that gets you into the game, 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 a great game of baseball in an era where a lack of competition tends to hurt the games that sports developers put out. While it’s much easier to recommend the PS3 or PS2 version of the game if you have those consoles, you won’t miss out on much, besides visuals, if you just have the PSP version. 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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