For now, one of these three lockup scenarios does appear to be avoidable so long as you don’t enable the “Hurry Up Baseball” feature. More often than not, when I’ve played with this feature enabled the game has locked the console before the game ended, a disaster which doesn’t seem to occur when it’s disabled. It’s a shame because Hurry Up Baseball is a great new feature that allows you to quickly play through a game without the need for extended inning change transitions and all the chatter that goes on between pitches.

Whether or not MLB 2k9 is for you depends largely on whether or not you’ll find its issues a mere annoyance or a deal braking violation of how the game of baseball should be represented in a video game. If a truly authentic hitter/pitcher battle is what you crave, for example, this isn’t going to do it for you. If what you really want is to just sit down and have some fun playing something that looks and feels a lot like baseball, even if it’s not the most authentic game on the market, then this game will do the job. The only thing that holds it back from getting a higher review score are the numerous bugs and system crashes I’ve experienced, something that could absolutely kill the game for too many people.

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