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Major League Baseball 2K6 Reviews - PS2
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| Publisher: | 2K Games |
| ESRB Rating: | Everyone |
| Release Date: | 4/6/2006 |
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More of a fun inside joke than a serious video game, but ... - 5/27/2008
I'll preface this review by saying my reasons for purchasing this game (a year after it came out) were for the sole reason that it features the elusive center-field camera. I am a baseball broadcaster for my college's team and I dream of one day being under the bright lights of an MLB broadcast…
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More of a fun inside joke than a serious video game, but ...
- 5/27/2008
I'll preface this review by saying my reasons for purchasing this game (a year after it came out) were for the sole reason that it features the elusive center-field camera.
I am a baseball broadcaster for my college's team and I dream of one day being under the bright lights of an MLB broadcast and looking at my program monitor zoomed in from its perch in center field. So, I'm in love with that camera angle and I tire of the highly unrealistic "catcher cam" view that most games have adopted. I had not seen a true center-field zoom since playing a game called "Bases Loaded" on NES -- yeah I didn't misspeak -- that's the original gray boxy Nintendo.
So anyway, that said, I happily ran home to try this game out with its custom player slots and franchise mode along with the coveted center-field camera. After teaching myself the pitching mechanics and no longer throwing wild pitch after wild pitch with runners on base, I was quite happy with the game on the whole.
Except for three things. Here they are in order from least-to-greatest frustration factor.
One major flaw that I personally don't care about is how many cinematic glitches there are. A batter will run through first base on a ground-out ... sometimes continuing to sprint all the way down the right-field line and into the wall if the game doesn't advance to the next shot in time. Other times, said batter will inexplicably zig and zag after being thrown out, sometimes breaking into a circular jog around first base. Also, if a fielder is caught in the throes of forward motion when the game loads the next cut-scene, he will often run full-sprint into whatever wall he's near, or if he's not near a wall then he'll just sprint out into the middle of nowhere for no apparent reason. Also, every time a batter strikes out, the game skips back and shows a few slo-mo frames of the strikeout cinematic where he flips the bat before walking away. It's really odd and creepy. So, suffice it to say, the elaborate cinematics and cut-scenes are very sluggishly woven together and they really take away from the game's flow overall.
Gripe No. 2, a slightly more annoying one: As much as I love listening to Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, their sequence of quips and sayings is often lost on me because there is a glitch that causes them to say the completely wrong thing from time to time. I give the benefit of the doubt to a ball hit to a certain part of the infield where they say "there's a bouncer to short" when it's clearly right back at the pitcher, because I figure it's something to do with the vector path the ball takes off the bat. But when a batter comes to the plate with a stat bar reading "0-1, Strikeout" and Jon Miller says nine out of ten times "He was thrown out trying to stretch a single into a double his last time" it just really gets more and more comical until the whole commentary is not so much an authentic ESPN-style broadcast as a complete farce. Just seems like some really shoddy quality control in the commentary.
Third and finally, and perhaps most utterly nonsensical and frustrating, is a glitch within the custom player module that allows you to control all aspects of your players so you can theoretically make them gods among men (I inadvertently engineered one guy to hit 52 homers and drive in 110 runs ... before the All-Star break), where some older games such as the "Triple Play" series would give you little or no direct attributional input. In a way this was a lot more fun. You could put your own name on a custom player and leave it to the inner workings of the game whether or not you'd be a slugger or a benchwarmer. I thought it was more fun anyway.
But the hitters are one thing, and the pitchers are another.
There seems to be absolutely no way to truly create a quality team that will at least be above .500 for your first year (so you have to constantly play a ton of games to make sure they even get into the playoffs). I'm not saying a team full of rookies should be that good ... but the thing is, in this game, all you can create is rookies. You can adjust the age to be as old as about 50, but you can never adjust a custom player to be considered a veteran. They're all rooks.
So, while offensively you can have a few guys explode and take the league by storm a la A-Rod in Seattle, your pitchers are going to be herky-jerky, inexperienced youngsters who can't be left alone to perform no matter how high you set their composure, how high you set the control on their pitches, how high you set their strikeouts, how low you set their opposing average/doubles/home runs.
I am currently in a simulated season with a team of relatively good pitchers (not great, but not truly awful), and I still have to actually play a game if I want a win. Now it would be one thing if I were able to actually manipulate 15-strikeout-games one after the other (which I can), but it doesn't even matter in that respect. I just have to be watching the thing. Sometimes if I'm doing other things and I want to have a game on, I'll let the computer play itself, and my pitchers will often throw three-hit shut-outs without me physically playing them. But, if I leave it to calendar simulation, I'll find I lose constantly by 10 or more runs, even though my team is supposedly first in pitching and 10th in offense according to the game's ranking system.
I've tried to remedy this by buying all the scouting reports, hiring and firing managers and coaches in order to try and get the pitching staff in order, and by turning on lineup/rotation optimization. But somehow I still have a bullpen full of 10-plus-ERA guys who complain about not getting enough playing time. Maybe my starting aces are just too good and they keep running complete games. But that's the other thing -- you tip the scales one way or another with a player's attributes by as much as an eyelash, and you'll be either great or terrible. No in-betweens, no solid players having the occasional great or terrible outing. It's basically black and white.
So overall this game is a shame if you really want a serious franchise sort of experience with your own host of custom players (oh by the way ... those great players ... they will most certainly get "much much worse" during spring training of your franchise's second year for some random reason). Quite frankly, I can't imagine mixing in fake players with a squad of real players on the same team, and I wish actually there were a game (hearkening back once again to the old NES "Bases Loaded") comprising entirely made-up players on fantasy teams.
Maybe someday?
So, anyway, if you've enjoyed this novella about how disappointing MLB 2K6 truly is, consider playing it with a few friends and see if the glitches don't become inside jokes before long!
A Bit Sloppy, But Overall What I Was Looking For
- 7/25/2007
I bought this game and I didn't know what to expect, and I think is a mixed bag. Overall, though, the game designers made it fun to play because of its fairly innovative controls (innovative, that is, for a baseball game).
This game is somewhat more unique than the other baseball games available today. One unique feature is the batting, which is entirely controlled by the right analog stick. I found this new control a bit hard to get used to (it's very, very different from simply pressing "X" to swing the bat). After a few hours of play, though, I was smacking 450-foot homers over the centerfield wall. Also, if you play the "Franchise" mode, there are some interesting features like the "Inside Edge" scouting reports, which you can buy and they will tell you a player's tendencies against certain batters and pitchers, whether lefties or righties, etc. The difficulty levels aren't really defined, mainly due to the feature in which the CPU makes minor adjustments in difficulty according to how your team is playing (although it can generally take a small winning streak or losing streak for this feature to kick in). The pitching controls are a bit tricky to get used to but if you pay attention to the tips being displayed in the graphic while the game is loading in, you'll soon figure it out.
On the negative side, this game is not very graphically sophisticated. The figures don't look anything like their actual major-league players; it seems as if the player models were taken from maybe only about a dozen or so major facial designs. Physically, they all look the same and the facial expressions are few and far between. There are several glitches, the most noticeable of which is when a baserunner continues to run in a straight line even after they have been tagged out. Also, I noticed that in several instances, a player who gets added to your team from a trade or free agency will sometimes wind up with the exact same number as another player already on the roster (whereas in real life one of the numbers would change). These glitches should have been fixed early on in the creation process. The menu controls are only fairly user-friendly and the background music always plays in the same sequence when one starts the game, which forced me to manually edit out the tunes I didn't care for.
Overall, I think it's a rather unique game that's fun to play when you figure out some of the different controls. If you're looking to buy it, go ahead, but just know that it's definitely not perfect.
Fun but gets old fast
- 6/15/2007
I was hoping to get a bargain when I bought this for 30 dollars. WORST choice of my life.
Graphics:
1/10
Batters have faces and a body.
Horrid lag between batters, innings, good play highlights, and after strike outs.
Sound:
3/10
Music is ok until you hear the same song again in a 5 minute span
Announcers get annoying....FAST
Controls:
6/10
One you get used to them it isn't so bad
Playability:
Moderate
Overall:
3.5/10
Outdated quickly
My recommendation:
Don't get 2k7 unless you plan to use it as a coaster.
This game sucks!
- 10/28/2006
The graphics are horrible! The faces of the players are smushed on their bodies to make it look like they just got ran over by a truck! The pitching is very confusing to figure out. It all depends on when you release the ball when the yellow circle is a certain size. It's so stupid. I got MLB O6 :The Show and let me tell ya, the graphics are awesome and everything is much better. Save yourself from buying another crappy 2K baseball game and get SONY'S game. MLB 06: The Show. You'll thank me later.
Hands down the worst video game I've ever purchased
- 9/25/2006
I don't even know where to begin with this game. The manual for it is absolutely awful, the main screen user interface is a joke, fielding is a nightmare, the pitcher will throw the ball into the stands even if you simply punch the corresponding button, to speak nothing of setting the breakpoint on the pitch. This is prime example of a company that is trying to set it's self apart by trying different controls, and they succeed in never getting another cent from me ever. I guess I'm just out the money. Don't ever buy games from 2K.
Game details and reviews brought to you courtesy of Amazon.com
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