MLB 2KSuck

I love video games. I play them often, and I have for years. I play a moderate variety of games. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time is the best one I've ever played and is probably the best one ever made, and do not argue this with me,  but for the purposes of this post, I'm concentrating mostly on sports games.

As I mentioned last week, when I was younger I played Ken Griffey, Jr. Presents Major League Baseball on the Super Nintendo, and most of my childhood baseball opinions were based on those experiences (my first reason for hating domed stadiums was that I couldn't hit home runs all the way out of the stadium).

I played RBI Baseball and Blades of Steel on the NES (though in the latter, I'd typically just do in-game fights with my dad). And now, I play FIFA 09 and MLB 2K8 on the XBox 360. So I know something about sports video games.

And because of that, you can take my word for it that the MLB 2K series sucks. Big time.

Honestly, probably the biggest problem with the series is that it's not EA Sports' MVP Baseball series, which is one of the shorter-lived sports franchises in video games (it was only produced in 2003, 2004 and 2005) but also one of the best.

The gameplay was great, and it was one of the more innovative series in sports gaming. It was, in 2004, the first to include minor league affiliates. It was also the first to eliminate the button-mashing pitching interface in favor of a more realistic system that involved a power/accuracy meter.

After EA got exclusive NFL game rights, though, Take-Two obtained similar third-party rights with Major League Baseball. Thus was born the mediocre 2K baseball series.

Like I mentioned, I bought MLB 2K8 last year, and at first was pretty happy with it. I thought the hitting and pitching interfaces (using gestures with the XBox's right control stick) were even more realistic than the EA version, because they allowed mistakes like in real life and factored in stamina more accurately.

The more I played it, though, the more its imperfections annoyed me. There are several in-game glitches. For example, in the seventh inning of each game a "game changing moment" highlight is shown, and in my game, every time the announcer claimed the play took place in the bottom of the seventh (which hadn't happened yet) and when the play was a home run, he claimed that it was an inside-the-park home run, which was obviously almost never true.

Diving is near impossible to do correctly, and when a diving player doesn't make the catch, he stays on the ground for several seconds. Once (with Moises Alou, shockingly enough) I missed a dive and the player never got up, turning a single into a home run.

There was no injury. I don't remember the last time that happened to someone not named Manny Ramirez in real life.

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