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Major League Baseball 2K6

Last fall, fans of the NFL 2K series mourned the loss of their favorite football franchise when the first Madden-exclusive season of gridiron action hit videogame systems everywhere without any real competition. Electronic Arts stockholders rejoiced, but not all gamers did. As good as Madden NFL and its NCAA college gridiron counterpart are, a fair portion of fans mourned the loss of choice and missed the things that the NFL 2K series did well that Madden did not.

This spring, the tables are turned. Gone is EA and their MVP MLB franchise and, apart from Sony’s first-party MLB game, in the absence of most competition stands only MLB 2K6. 2K Sports’ baseball game has always been a popular option, if not exactly the most popular choice. In fact, baseball fans are pretty fickle from year-to-year. One of my first-ever favorite baseball titles was an EA title: Tony LaRussa Baseball on Sega Genesis. The game was so good that even successive versions from EA never really appealed to me, well into the PSone/N64 era. But Sega eventually developed a well-received series of their own, World Series Baseball, which is the direct ancestor of the MLB 2K series.

Yet it hasn’t always been a direct path. More recently, many fans fell in love with baseball games by now-defunct publishers like 3DO and Acclaim, just to name a couple. And speaking personally, the last couple years my affection has been drawn back to EA with their completely-redone MVP MLB series, which began to recapture some of that ol’ Tony LaRussa Baseball magic. This year, the only real competition is the surprisingly good and suddenly resurgent MLB 06: The Show from Sony, which is only available on PS2 and PSP. For everyone else, MLB 2K6 is the only choice.

So, is it good? To be completely honest … yes! And no.

Let’s talk about what’s great first. With this iteration of MLB 2K6, focusing specifically on the PS2 version, MLB 2K6 is really pretty exciting if one is looking for a wide variety of modes to play through. For example, some old favorites are back in force. My personal favorite, the GM Mode, is back and further enhanced by new features, such as Inside Edge scouting reports that make it easier to find an opposing pitcher or batter’s weaknesses; these scouting reports, which you can buy against opposing teams, are informed by three years of real-world performance and statistics tracking, a powerful tool. A career/dynasty mode is back and has also been similarly improved to allow for longer runs.

Both modes have learned a bit from the now-exterminated competition. For example, you can sim, manage or play any game on your calendar, and the manage mode this year is basically an improved version on the popular manage-mode in EA’s MVP franchise from last year. Building on the base concept, 2K Sports’ version is a bit better looking, less plain and more fully-featured. It’s a nice touch. Often, game developers focus all their energy on creating new modes and let older, established modes go almost untouched from year-to-year; with MLB 2K6, this is not the case.

Another example is the new online mode. Now compatible with broadband only (sorry, dialup gamers!), the online experience has also received a considerable makeover, offering a lot more in the way of an online community, online tourneys and events, online stat tracking, buddy list management to make finding your pals online easier, and much more. While previous versions had many of these online features, this year’s edition has been streamlined, refined and improved.

The newest mode or feature, however, is not a complete mode, really. It’s the addition of the World Baseball Classic into the game, the international tournament some players are now allowed to take part in as an alternative to a full season of spring training. That’s fun, but not a major new mode. Just a nice feature with all 16 teams, authentic logos and uniforms and the actual tournament structure. So that’s kinda cool

In terms of game play, however, MLB 2K6 represents some serious re-working over last year’s edition. First, the game’s physics have been completely redone to make hits, running, throwing, fielding, tag-outs and more a lot more genuine and accurate to real-world models. Add to this the new Swing Stick control, which is so basic, it makes you wonder why no one ever thought of it before. Instead of timing a press of the X-button or doing a double-tap on a batting meter gauge, MLB 2K6 allows you to use the right analog stick as your virtual bat. Get ready for the swing by pulling the stick toward you. Let go at just the right time and you’ll get a hit. Before letting go, if you pull down and then angle it just a bit right or left, you can control the direction of the hit to some extent. It’s natural and feels right and makes sense. Well done.

Yet there are features that worked well in previous years that are MIA. For example, in 2004, when the series was titled ESPN Baseball 2K4, they game featured a highly-appealing “player confidence” feature. In essence, it worked like this: if a player gets a hit, his confidence grows. If he strikes out, it falls. Same goes for pitchers. But that’s nowhere to be found anymore. Too bad, it was a good idea. Instead, all that remains is that when your pitcher is faced with a bases-loaded situation, the targeting system gets “jumpy,” making it hard to place your pitch correctly. I supposed this is what the confidence feature has grown into, but there’s no parallel for batters.

Unfortunately, unlike Sony’s baseball title, MLB 2K6 does not allow you as many options for what part of the game to control and what part to turn over to the CPU. In Sony’s title, for example, fielding can be completely player controlled, CPU assisted, or done automatically by the CPU, which some players who just want to pitch and bat find appealing. In 2K Sports’ game, however, you can only choose from complete player control of fielding, or CPU-assisted fielding. There’s no “auto-fielding” to be found. That might put off some gamers who, well… suck at fielding, or just don’t want to be bothered with it.

But the biggest sin of the PS2 version of MLB 2K6 is this: the graphics and animation just are not at a major league level. Sure, we expect that the Xbox 360 version will throw a fresh coat of paint on, when it’s released about two months later and for $20 more – but our focus right now is the PS2 version and, frankly, it’s ugly in a lot of way. For example, if a pitcher strikes out a guy, getting the third out and ending an inning, there’s a close-up celebration animation, which would look good except there’s tons of skips and holes in it, making Jarrod Washburn or Johann Santana appear to be going through an epileptic fit rather than a celebration. Of course, there’s still the predictable cardboard cutout crown that often gets exposed by bad camera angles.

The camera’s not always bad, though; it will often track with a runner after a hit, giving you a fresh perspective on what would otherwise be a standard and somewhat boring play. Whether 2K Sports will actually take the time to fix these animation holes, or just make them look better remains to be seen; but for PS2 owners, the graphical shortcomings of this game make Sony’s MLB 06: The Show a suddenly-even-more-appealing option. When you consider that in MLB 2K6 you can’t build a new stadium, control ticket or concession prices or any of the other things MLB 06: The Show lets you do, the scales start to balance out.

In many ways, MLB 2K6 is a very solid game. It’s enjoyable, offering plenty of game modes and general likeability. But thanks to a features list that just isn’t as rich and flexible as it ought to be, and some serious ugliness on the graphical front, it’s just really hard to give MLB 2K6 the pennant this year, especially when PS2/PSP owners still have a choice. If you’re looking for more options, more variety, more control and generally good game play, Sony’s game takes the pennant this year. If you can overlook the graphical ugliness and the slimmer set of options and features, there’s still a lot to like about MLB 2K6, especially the new Swing Stick batting controls. Maybe next year, 2K!

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Tags: Major League Baseball 2K6

Posted by Craig "American Idle" Hansen on Apr 19th, 2006 and is filed under PS2 Reviews, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.

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