Archive for May, 2007

Well, MLB 08 The Show should be fantastic.

This almost is – I’ve just started playing and the only reason I’ve stopped is that my PSP battery has run down – but it’s spoiled by some very rough edges. I’m playing The Road to the Show mode, where you create a played and play as that player alone. I’m a second baseman on the Braves and I hit when it’s my turn, control my baserunning and if the ball comes near me when I’m playing defense I’ll have to get the ball and throw it. The rest of the game isn’t shown – it just jumps to those moments where I’ve got something to do.

It’s almost great.

The first trouble is the load times. They are truly atrocious and quite possibly the worst I’ve seen yet on the PSP. You simply can’t just sit down and play this game. You need something on TV to watch while it loads, or a magazine, or some cake, or something.

The second problem is that there’s not a lot of feedback. If you go for a double play when you’re fielding then you’ll know if you got the first out, but not the second. Without pausing the game and waiting for a text display to scroll across the screen you won’t know whether the last pitch was a ball or a strike while you’re on base. (This may possibly be better with sound, but I’ve been playing with sound off and I think all handheld games that aren’t music-based should be designed with silent play in mind.)

The third problem is that sometimes rules don’t seem to be applied properly and now and again the post-game box score won’t agree with what’s displayed on your stats for that game. I’m sure I’ve had a run credited before that shouldn’t have counted and in my last game the box score said I had an RBI, but the summary screen after that said I hadn’t. Odd.

Still, despite all those problems, it is incredibly addictive. The PS3 version might fix a lot of these flaws and be a good buy and, as I said, MLB 08 should be great. They can’t keep those load times in the next version, they just can’t.