989 has made a decent game for the first time in eight years

Well, it took a long time, but I’ve finally played a decent portable baseball game. That’s not to say that this game is spectacular. It just gets the job done. Before MLB was released, I did not want to touch it with a forty-foot pole. Since 1999, seeing a 989 Studios label on a game has always been a black flag. They have notoriously had the worst franchises out there, including NHL Faceoff, NFL Gameday (pre 1999), NCAA Gamebreaker—I could go on until I ran out of sports. Thankfully, MLB breaks the tradition of pure 989 suck and brings to us the first, and at present, the only good baseball game for PSP.

MLB looks great. It looks like they’ve done their research on just about everything there is to do with the game. The fields are beautiful, the players are well-textured, and the player animations are spectacular. I’ve never seen such great fluidity in a 6-4-3 double play in a video game, nor have I seen plays where a player will dive for the ball, bounce off his glove, and land in another player’s glove for the out. I have heard that this game runs at 60 FPS, which really helps the visual quality. MLB also covers most batting and pitching stances and motions for individual players, which I saw as excellent attention to detail. The spectators are just pixilated gunk, but such is the case with all baseball video games.

The gameplay itself is good, although a bit quirky. When playing on offense, you can choose to ‘guess the pitch’ that is coming next by holding the L trigger and pressing whichever button corresponds to a pitch, such as X for fastball. I found myself relying on this too much, and now realize that it somewhat diminishes the gameplay experience. This is optional, however, so baseball purists may want to avoid guessing pitches. Pitching in MLB is very well done, as you use the thumbstick to align a pitching marker to where you want to throw the ball. A pitching meter is then used to judge the speed and accuracy of the throw. Precision speed pitching is key, but if you continue throwing the fastest balls you’ve got, your stamina will wear down and your accuracy will be terrible, making the pitcher throw wild pitches or hang the ball high for an easy home run for the CPU.

When I first played MLB I had around fifteen hits; one home run and the rest were all singles. I would hit the ball all the way to the fence, yet get thrown out at second. I had to adjust the sliders so that throwing was much slower. I couldn’t adjust base running speed. Also, sometimes plays in the field resulted in choppiness or slowdown. The option to ‘lead-off’ on specific runners was included in the manual, but not in the game. This killed the ability to steal well for me.

MLB is also chock full of bugs, usually occurring once every three to five games. A ball may roll through a wall somehow, resulting in an inside-the-park home run, or a fielder will grab a ball and just hold on to it, resulting in, yet again, a home run. I’ll let it slide, but I do wonder how these commonly recurring events got past the beta testers.

Audio presentation is great, especially with the headphones on. The crowd reacts to every great or bum call, and the announcers give a positive impact to MLB. They sometimes give helpful bits of information that can influence your strategy, such as comments that Roger Clemens is notorious for using his split-fingered fastball. Some audio presentation was lacking, however, as they would mostly comment on how the player coming up to bat was “digging in.” They needed to shuffle more sound bytes for that, and perhaps fit in some more useful information for individual players. Also, when I brought in a pinch-hitter, they would announce that I brought in a pinch-runner. I didn’t mind too much, but this area needed to be refined a little more.

Overall presentation, however, was poor. There were no popups of statistics regarding players coming up to bat, there was no animation of batters walking up to the plate, nor any umpires. As soon as a batter strikes out, he immediately blinks out and gets replaced by another batter. If a batter was arguing a strike called against him, you would see him turn his back and argue at thin air. I appreciate that they worked a lot on gameplay, but there is no excuse for the total lack of a TV atmosphere.

Online play is included in MLB. Don’t bother. The lag is absolutely unbearable. You pretty much have to swing three to four seconds before the ball gets to you, and just maybe he’ll swing at the right moment. This feature should’ve just been dropped.

There is a lack of a franchise mode in MLB. I do not really understand why, as that is the centerpiece of most sports games these days (even the terrible ones). Also, you cannot create a player. I can’t imagine it taking much effort to just throw that in there and let you have some 8-foot-tall monster with David Eckstein’s constipated batting stance. Oh well.

Overall I’d say MLB is worth a buy, especially if you can find it at around half MSRP. It’s got a lot of bugs and totally feels like an incomplete game, but at least it’s better than the alternative MVP Baseball 2005. MLB is very well done for a first-generation title.

Pros
• Beautiful, fluid animations
• Good audio presentation
• Individual batting and pitching stances
• Great gameplay

You know what burns me? (Cons)
• Had to adjust sliders to fix gameplay
• Choppy animations
• Recurring bugs
• Total lack of presentation including popups and umpires
• Online play is a waste
• No franchise, no create-a-player

7.3 out of 10