MLB: The Show

also 4 years xpost but i would be interested in joining a league.

holy moley, the new version (mlb 16) completely blows the last one out of the water. all the complaints i had above have been addressed, and everything just seems so much smoother and natural.

there's also a new Battle Royale mode which is completely addicting. you draft a team from scratch, which sounds laborious, but is actually very easy and fun. for each draft pick you're given a choice of 4 players to choose from, and it's organized so that your team will have one diamond player, 2 golds, a handful of silvers and several more bronzes to round things out. in the mix of players you can choose from are older players, so the team i drafted and played with last night had Barry Larkin at SS and Mike Schmidt at 3B, surrounded by a lesser cast. anyways, you draft a team and then play 3-inning online games against other similarly created teams. as you win games, you rise up in the tiers (and the farther you go the better rewards you unlock, although i don't really care about that right now), and you're out when you lose twice in a row (or maybe just twice at all - i've only lost once out of 7 games, humblest of humble brags, so i'm not sure). i thought 3-inning games would kind of suck but they've adjusted the pitcher stamina so that your starter will start to run out of steam around the late 2nd inning/early 3rd inning, and earlier than that if your pitch count is running up. anyway it's all balanced well so that on my first run of games last night, nearly every single one was pretty tense and ended in an interesting way.

haven't even touched the other modes yet but the actual gameplay is much improved. better animations, which may sound like just an aesthetic improvement but they're also quite a bit smoother and lifelike so it makes the game much more immersive. also, small sample size but fielding seems less frustrating this time, i.e., a bit more forgiving in the outfield. i even managed to pull off a few catches deep in the gaps after covering a ton of distance with my CF, which is something that i had trouble with in the last version.

verdict: you should give tons of money to some giant company again in order to make a fake ball fly around the screen

i am fucking scared to even start playing. i started a franchise (that i will prob start over once the operation sports roster drops) and played two spring training games and i'm just like "ok what the fuck do i do here even"

have you played the show before? last year's version was my first one, and it took me a while to figure out what the hell was going on.

it also seems like a game with split communities of interest. some people are all about franchise, but others play road to the show exclusively. i am pretty sure i'll be playing battle royale a ton. i love how it's designed so that you'll be changing teams/players relatively frequently, like every few days of real-time. it keeps things fresh. and while i had zero interest in saving up a bunch of in-game currency to unlock a "classic" player, it's a ton of fun to suddenly have the option to put one in your lineup and use them for several games. there was a hard-to-describe thrill of inserting mike schmidt into the lineup and then realizing that they totally nailed his stance and swing (which i pretty much know just from baseball cards and a few old baseball clips).

i think baseball is a difficult game to use as the basis for a franchise mode because while full 162-game season is such a slog, simulating a franchise by only playing 1 game a week (or however you choose to do it) just feels unsatisfying. maybe it depends on how into stats you are, but when i see my player's stats, they don't mean much to me if 5 out of every 6 games is simulated. they're more meaningful when you've played every PA. but maybe that's just me.

i've had every version for the last 5ish years i think, but last year i didn't play much. haven't played a franchise since the days when i had more free time. it scares me now that i have more of a life.

last 1-2 years i've been a RTTS guy, playing mostly a closer and occasionally a position... i wanted to do franchise this year. might be too much for me tho.

ugh dammit, if they were gonna go to the trouble of adding all this awesome-sounding stuff then I'm REALLY frustrated they weren't able to port it to the Vita. baseball is maybe the perfect sport for mobile, especially on a platform with actual buttons so that you can field at least somewhat respectably; you can play for a couple of games, or a couple of innings, or a couple of at-bats, or even a couple of pitches if that's what you've got time for.

then again I would probably be the only one to buy it anyway so oh well. it's just extra-galling since now that's two awesome baseball games we'll never be able to enjoy natively on Vita (alongside the saintly and unfuckwithable Super Mega Baseball of course).

is this the only franchise that actually tries to improve game after game?

i'm watching the new march to october mode and it is amazing.
the show 19 has the potential to be the best sports game in a while.

Oh yeah? I haven’t decided on whether or not I’m picking up this year’s game. I’ll have to look into the new mode. Is it a new spin on the season mode?

Online games are sometimes thrilling, but often get derailed by weird lag/bugs, which is incredibly frustrating when you get fucked at the end of a really good, close game. I would also frequently run into other players who would somehow CRUSH everything I pitched, like every single time, and I couldn’t figure out if they were cheating or if there are people they are actually that good

karl, i'm going by this new video just uploaded a couple days ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hf8dQWx8yA

it's a long one, but it seems pretty informative. it goes over
march to october and gameplay.

i think online gameplay is a mix of skill and response time/ghosting,
which is affected by internet speed and your TV. was your ping and
response time ok? big, cheap TVs can be a problem.

i have never played the show and i want to download '19 immediately based on nothing more than these facts:

1) i really miss baseball
2) super mega-baseball doesn't let me do pickoff moves

i have this niggly feeling that the show is going to be WAY more game than i want though