Review by: Todd Brakke

Last year MLB ’09: The Show was, without question, the single best console baseball game you could buy. That didn’t make it much different from the previous edition, although it did boast many notable and necessary improvements that made it a must-get compared to ‘08. With MLB ’10 the franchise’s status as the single best on-the-field baseball game you can play remains firmly intact, but at the same time, players of the ’09 version may find there’s not a lot of compelling reasons to make the move on up to this year’s new hotness.

The litmus test for a successful evolution of an annual sports game is whether or not you’d be just as happy continuing on with a past version as you would with playing the new one. When you have a franchise like The Show, which models baseball on the field just about as well as it can be done, it has to be a challenge for SCE San Diego to sit in a meeting room and say, “Okay, how do we make this game $60 better next year?”

This time around most of the focus seems to be in tweaking off-the-field features in the game and in making for a smoother on-field experience. A lot of focus this year is on giving user a bit more control over how they play the game. One of the best of these new features is individual difficulty settings for hitting and pitching. This may seem like a rather trivial addition, but it’s actually huge. Hitting and pitching in a baseball game are completely different skill sets. Some players are far better at pitching than at hitting and vice-versa. Adjusting the game’s individual settings sliders can make a difference, but that process is also mind-numbing to nail down. Being able to just flip to the menu and set Hitting to Easy and Pitching to Veteran is a much faster and more impactful way of letting a player set the game to better suit his individual ability.

In addition, there are more options for customizing how quickly the game plays, both in regular exhibition and franchise games and when playing in the Road to the Show (RttS) mode (where you create and control just one specific player). Although Fast Play was an option last year, this year there is a bit more of a middle ground between a full-on TV-like presentation and a bare-bones one, although if you’re looking to get in a game in under an hour Fast Play is pretty much where it’s at.

In Road to the Show, if you played as a position player (non-pitcher), you would only see the parts of the game where the ball was put into play. This year you can set the game to show you every single pitch or just the pitch that results in an out or a ball put into play. Having these options does make this mode a bit more interesting. What’s disappointing in these options is that they could still use a bit more fleshing out. RttS needs to let you configure offensive and defensive setting individual (just like with hitting versus pitching difficulty), while Fast Play needs some tweaking; for example, it lingers on the field during a routine fly out or foul ball for a couple seconds longer than necessary (which does add up over a game), yet knocking a grand slam over the centerfield fence is over and done before you can even manage to shake your fist in the air. It’s a bit backwards.