Review by: Todd Brakke

Last year 2K Sports’ Major League Baseball release offered a lot of promise mired in a lot of flaws. This time around, with the release of MLB 2k9, Visual Concepts has improved nearly every facet of the game and yet many of the old blemishes still remain—and a couple of new ones have surfaced.

With respect to the single most important aspect of any baseball game, the play on the field, there is a lot to like. The graphics are a notch above last year’s game, but more importantly all the little hitches and stutters in the on-field action are gone. There is significant improvement to the variety of animations as players go about the business of hitting, fielding and pitching. It all lends the game an improved air of authenticity that was too often missing last year.

The innovative control scheme from last year, which relied heavily on use of the right analog stick for both pitching and hitting is back. On default settings, both have been simplified a bit to make the game more approachable. In truth, these default settings are a bit too simplified for experienced gamers. That said you can re-enable some optional settings, Release Timing for pitchers and Batter’s Eye (guess pitch) for hitters, to add a bit of the old complexity back.

The game does offer one entirely new mode for hitting: Zone Hitting. It’s really not zone hitting at all since traditional zone hitting is about using the control stick to swing to a specific plate location, like trying to reach high and outside to chase a pitch. What 2K Sports calls Zone Hitting is really a new cursor-based system, in which a bat cursor appears on the screen as the pitch is on its way. You must then move it to the ball at the same time you’re trying to judge balls and strikes and whether or not to swing. I found it much too difficult to juggle all that, but those with better reflexes might get more enjoyment from it.

Speaking of balls and strikes, that’s one area where this game continues to struggle. On default settings AI pitchers can absolutely paint the strike zone, and so can you so long as you call your own pitches (your AI catcher calls a truly terrible game, if you choose to go with his suggestions). AI pitchers in particular rarely put themselves behind in the pitch count, let alone actually walk a guy. And if you’re waiting for one to serve up a meatball right over the heart of the plate, you’ll be waiting for a long time.