MLB 08: The Show

The last few years of The Show have been promising glimpses of how good a baseball game can be. Each iteration made stabs at overtaking EA's MVP Baseball '05 as Best Baseball Game Ever. While the core gameplay in The Show has always been top-notch, each release has been plagued by varied problems -- sub-par graphics in 2007's PS3 version, poor online performance, wonky bugs.

But 2008 is the year where The Show has finally put it all together. This is the best baseball you'll find on any console anywhere and easily lays the legendary MVP 05 to rest.

The core of the game is how great the pitching/batting duel works. Pitching is even more fun this year with the addition of new pitch types (moving fastball being the most common) and statistical analysis in-game that shows your location tendencies and what pitches are/aren't working. Same goes for batting. It's a bit unforgiving at first as you learn how to stay patient at the plate and read incoming pitches and time your swings, but once you become acclimated, it's extremely satisfying to hit. Ball physics also seem much tighter this year, with more realistic and varied line drives/bloopers/flyouts to the outfield.

The most noticeable improvement is how good the game looks now. Detailed textures on grass, dirt, uniforms, helmets and stadiums all help bring the realism to near-photo quality, while improved real-time shadows and depth-of-field effects put the players in what feels like real space and a real broadcast on your TV. Character models are still a little out-of-proportion -- arms too short, shoulders too wide. And some stadiums haven't been given the full next-gen treatment as gracefully as others. The game runs perfectly smooth at 720p. If you want higher resolution in the distance and infielders, you can play at 1080p, but the frame rate will dip during busy sequences and you'll lose the depth-of-field effects, which really improve the look of the game dramatically. It's not worth the tradeoff, in my opinion, to play at 1080p unless you just must have the sharpest picture possible.

Overall atmosphere is also amazing. Stadiums have much more life. Fans leap for foul balls, infielders can dive into the stands to grab flyouts, runners heading into home plate can crash into the catcher to knock the ball out of his mitt. It's also fun to see so many new animations in the field. The variety of new moves add to the realism, and responsive fielding animations seem much more context sensitive than MLB 07 (e.g. the slow lolly-gag throws to first while the runner squeeks by safely).

This is also the first year where I've tried Road to the Show. I've written it off as a gimmick mode in the past, but this really is an entirely unique game unto itself. The pace is much faster than Franchise, and more instantly gratifying as you constantly get a stream of training points after you play each game and really has a stat-buliding role-playing game feel to it. It's easily the most addictive, "just one more turn" style of gameplay you'll see in a baseball game and will keep you up into the wee hours if you don't keep tabs on your clock.

There are a few niggling problems. (It wouldn't be The Show if there weren't.) But thankfully these are really minor compared to the more glaring flaws in previous versions.

One of the bigger annoyances are the requirements before you can create an online league. You have to register and then wait 14 days before you can create one. You must also complete 10 online games and be rated by your peers favorably. It just seems like unnecessary barriers to something that should just work out of the box without these silly hoops. One other online league complaint -- there's no fantasy draft, so you'll have to use default team rosters, which obviously creates imbalance problems.

There's also some colliision detection problems. While it's innocuous to see your outfield back into and through a stadium wall while fielding a flyout, it's more problematic when the collision detection isn't working when fielding grounders. You'll have to square up and make clean grabs at the ball, and even then you may have an occasional ball slip through or past your legs that shouldn't.

Each year I can't wait to see what the folks at SCEA have put together in this franchise. It's clear the developers honestly love the game of baseball and take pride in their work.