Major League Baseball 2K6 is one of the most frustrating sports games of recent memory. You can see that there is a great, great game just dying to get out from behind its numerous issues. Developer Kush Games has packed a lot of interesting and innovative new features into this year's game but it has an incomplete and rushed feel to it that in the end make it very hard to recommended – the problem is that this is the only new Major League Baseball game on the Xbox thanks to the 2K Sports/EA Sports licensing wars so unless you have a PS2 or PSP (and if you do you should be playing the significantly better MLB 06: The Show) this is your only graphics intensive big league option.

"Graphics intensive" may be a bit of a stretch as the game (on both Xbox and Xbox 360) looks shockingly outdated in many areas. The player animation is incomplete as it's obvious that frames are missing when the players are moving and throwing, .For example, on a slow roller to third base, the fielder grabs the ball and all of a sudden the ball rockets from what looks like the chest of the third baseman so fast that it would make Brooks Robinson green with envy. The throwing motion is sometimes literally non-existent. Other times, it takes the infielder what seems like an eternity to throw the ball at all. It's all very weird.

Weird doesn't begin to describe the ball physics. The way the ball moves in flight in MLB 2K6 is downright baffling. When viewing the ball on replay it's like every game is played in a 50 MPH wind; the ball goes up, drops a few feet, then straightens out like a Tiger Woods 5-iron.

The stadiums look good, though, (although the new Busch stadium is not in the Xbox version for some reason) as do the crowds. Still, on the whole the graphics are a mish-mash of good and bad and the animations make the game look a lot worse than it should. It's telling that a game on the PS2 and PSP (The Show) looks significantly better than MLB 2K6 on both the Xbox and the 360. Adding to the frustration with the graphics is the camera angles. It's tough to get the fielding cam in a good spot and even the overhead Broadcast cam is blocked by the foul ball fence behind home plate, making that view practically useless in many ballparks.

The play by play of Miller and Morgan is very good for the most part. In fact the overall broadcast style presentation is first rate. At times the play by play gets out of sync with what's going on, but it's hard to complain about how the game sounds. (Well, aside from the soundtrack, that is. Is it asking too much for some baseball music in today's games? Modern alt-rock and hip hop just doesn't scream "Take me out to the ballgame.").

The graphics, animation, and sound do a good job in reflecting how the rest of the game plays. It's a mix of very good and stunningly bad. There are a lot of great ideas in MLB 2K6. The new Inside Edge scout system is a wonderful feature that takes into account a catcher's ability to call a game by suggesting the pitch and its location (and catchers are rated in how well they do this.) The new hitting method, which is similar to MVP's analog system, uses the right stick to simulate the motion of swinging a bat, and after you get used to it, it works quite well. The entire pitcher/batter interface is pretty cool and if the rest of the game were as good and well thought out the game would be a certified winner.

But it's not.

The AI is spotty at best. You may play a game or two without any glaring missteps but then you'll see it screw up routine baseball stuff like a pitcher batting in the bottom of the 6th and getting pulled at the start of the 7th, a ground ball to the first baseman won't advance a runner that's on second, pitchers refusing to SAC bunt, fielders try to throw out lead runners with two outs when a throw to first ends the inning, and hitters that pop out get credited with a hit in the boxscore. What makes this all the more strange is that it doesn't always mess this stuff up, but it happens with enough regularity that's it's a major issue and really takes away from the game, especially when the AI does something spectacularly boneheaded late in a tight ballgame.

In one case, the Reds were playing the Rockies and on a base hit to right field the Colorado runner rounded 3rd base and then continued to run right past the bag, through the base coach box, and almost to the dugout before stopping and diving back to the bag at 3rd. The runner should have scored easily but didn't – and this isn't just bad AI, it's a glaring programming error that pretty much ruined that particular game. These sort of things happen way too often in MLB 2K6.

2 As if the sketchy AI wasn't bad enough, the game has perhaps the worst fielding model since the old WSB on the Dreamcast. Actually, the model isn't that bad but its implementation is terrible. A new "momentum" model is in place that is supposed to be more realistic, but it ends up being marvelously silly. Fielders at times get ridiculously slow jumps on the ball which dramatically skews the results of a game. It's important that games try to separate good glove men from bad, but this is done so over the top that it just looks ridiculous. It shouldn't take 2B Ryan Freel a full two seconds to respond to a ground ball hit in the hole. These delays are very common and it's terribly aggravating.

Finally, there are the game's franchise/career modes. All of the neat features are all well and good but if the stat model and trade AI is broken then it's hard to get too excited about playing multiple seasons. Stat wise, the pitchers are all over the map. When 45 pitchers issue 100+ walks per year you know you are playing a game with a flawed stat engine. Oddly enough a lot of starters repeatedly finish the season with ERAs under 3.00 and many under 2.00. How they do that after walking so many hitters remains a mystery. On top of the stats the CPU makes trades with itself during the year that are very bizarre. Weird stats and trades are bad enough but what effectively kills MLB 2K6's franchise mode is that player development is pretty much broken. Five years into a career and very few rookie players are good enough to advance to the Majors and as a result most teams start slipping into mediocrity because there's no young talent to fill the void.