'MLB 09: The Show' is exactly that

The first thing you notice when you fire up the PlayStation 3 build of ?MLB 09: The Show? is that it?s the best-looking and sounding baseball game ever. The player models and ballparks are stunning, and the crowd looks and sounds like it?s filled with real people instead of the weird cardboard cutouts or animated mannequins you?ve seen in other games. The soundtrack is fantastic, and the presentation, depth, ability to customize and attention to detail match the eye-catching graphics.

By letting gamers pick the camera angles through which they view their pitchers and hitters, ?The Show? (rated E, $60 on PS3, $30 on PS2, $40 on PlayStation Portable) ensures everyone is comfortable. Better yet, all camera angles and alternate presentations feel equally smooth. There?s no tacked-on, half-broken view that seems entirely pointless.

Game types include typical exhibition, season, franchise and practice modes we?ve come to expect in baseball titles. The signature mode, though, is ?Road to the Show,? in which you create a minor league player and try to make it to the bigs, win the World Series and eventually land in the Hall of Fame. There are about a million ways you can customize your player, but my favorite was scrolling through a list of names to determine what announcers would call my player. (I settled on Sir Dudenstein DuBois, even though that wasn?t my character?s actual name.)

?The Show? can be intimidating for new players. While it features in-game tips on such nuances as how to pick off runners, steal bases, align the defense, queue up a throw to a base and more, they don?t always pop up at the most useful moment. Is it expecting too much to want a tutorial on hitting to come up the first time I face live pitching?

Newbies would also appreciate a healthier dose of adaptive difficulty. Being familiar with the competing ?Major League Baseball 2K9,? I found that my strike-zone judgment as well as ability to time pitches was significantly off when I first tried ?The Show.? I tried to compensate by focusing on timing the pitches, no matter their location. ?The Show? was smart enough for its announcers to dog my players for swinging at everything, yet the game never asked me if I wanted the computer-controlled pitcher to throw more pitches over the plate, or slow down the speed to give me more time to track location.

Instead, it was on me to recognize my shortcomings, discover the sliders to tweak the game?s difficulty and adjust them until I got used to hitting. Of course, I know to do these things because I play video games all the time, but if Sony is serious about competing with the Wii and catering to a broad audience, a little handholding goes a long way.

While it might take you a dozen or more hours to wrap your fingers around ?The Show?s? control scheme, everything works smoothly; there are no glaring, game-wrecking bugs on par with the heinous fielding in ?MLB 2K9.? That said, ?The Show? could stand to poach a feature or two from its younger brother, namely 2K?s intuitive, fun pitching and hitting controls that center around the dual analog sticks. Compared with ?2K9?s? pitching and hitting controls, those in ?The Show? feel dated. Complex control schemes that require three button presses to pitch and use of both analog sticks as well as face buttons to hit are the sort of thing that led Nintendo to create the intuitive Wii remote.

I could go on at length about all the things ?The Show? does right, such as letting gamers share custom rosters online, complete with a YouTube-style rating system, but this review would be three times as long. Suffice it to say that there?s a love and an attention to detail in ?The Show? that just isn?t found in most sports titles, or video games in general. If you?re willing to pore over the manual and in-game tip menus, plus put in the time to master the somewhat elaborate control scheme, you?ll be rewarded with the richest console baseball sim this generation has to offer.

Staff Writer Eric Wittmershaus blogs about video games at gamewit.pressdemocrat .com. You can reach him at 521-5433 or eric.wittmershaus @pressdemocrat.com.