Rating:


Price: $29.99–$59.99

The Skinny: It's March, which means unmarked boxes of performance enhancing—uhh—corn are flying through the Dominican Republic's post office. Lace up your spikes, grab a bat, and get ready for a loosey-goosey time.

The Good: We don't blame developers for doing this, but this is essentially last year's game with a few visual touchups and some nifty new features. The Road to the Show mode, the bread and butter of the baseball series, is still solid and now includes extra training days which allow you to juice up your created player's stats faster. Online play seemed stable enough when we logged-in, but we wish our hard-earned wins and stats from last year carried over. We'd advise playing on All-Star difficulty or higher offline to get used to the kind of competition you'll face on the PlayStation Network.

 

The Bad: Again, RttS is awesome, but the difficulty skews toward infield positions because of the way experience and penalty points are handled. You won't see good enough power numbers for homer-jacking until way later into your career, so you'll have to rely on the basics—good defense and seeing-eye singles—at the start. Shortstops and second basemen seem to be the easiest to progress (assists earn double the amount of points than regular putouts) but there is some uneveness with how plays are rewarded. For example, hitting into a double play nets you a cool -10 points while turning a 6-4-3 gets you zero.

Have A Say: One of a number of new features is custom taunts, allowing you to record your own cheers and jeers for individual players, like, say having the crowd chant NEEDLE DICK! NEEDLE DICK! whenever A-Rod strides to the plate.

Buy, Rent, or Disembowel: If you're new to the series, this is a must buy. If not, try before you upgrade your roster buy. If you don't know what baseball is, why the hell'd ya read this for?