‘The Show’ strikes out ‘2K10’ in gaming
My eternal complaint about baseball video games is they require debilitating patience. All you want to do is swing away. But if you rush yourself in the batter's box, expect to hit badly and get trounced.
You especially have to be patient while playing either "MLB '10: The Show" or "Major League Baseball 2K10."
When you're batting, the only way to win is -- most of the time -- to passively wait for the opposing pitcher to get into his windup, watch him toss, and then let his unhittable ball just fly past you. Over and over and over.
If you aren't patient with that mechanical process, you'll swing at everything, and then the game's artificial intelligence will realize you are dumb and start throwing you nothing but junk balls.
When it's time to pitch, I'm more able to stay calm and composed, because every pitch is an active process in trying to strike someone out -- tossing curves from the outside of the plate inward, and fastballs at the corners.
Fortunately, this year, one game is good enough to make me want to sit patiently in the batter's box: "MLB '10: The Show."
"The Show" is by far the more entertaining and enticing title this year, outdistancing "Major League Baseball 2K10" by leaps and bounds.
"The Show" looks way more realistic. The pitching is precise and smooth. The batting requires diligent patience, but at least you can clearly see the ball coming over the plate (or heading away from the plate).
By comparison, "2K10" looks less realistic, even slightly cartoonish. The pitching is erratic and imprecise, especially when my ball-aimer quivers onscreen for no reason. The batting is fair enough, I suppose.
There are a lot of bells and whistles in both games. In each, you can create a baseball guy from scratch, play with him over the course of many games, and improve his attributes by playing well and accomplishing challenges.
In both, you can go online for individual games or leagues, although many online gamers gripe that lagging in computer servers makes the online component less appealing.
And in both, you can play stand-alone games, or in a season stretching 162 games. Season gaming isn't for me, since one game can last 40 minutes. Forty minutes multiplied by 162 games equals I-have-no-life.
Bottom line: Aside from bells and whistles, what makes a baseball game a good time hasn't changed: Fluid and intuitive pitching, fielding, hitting and base running. "The Show" has all that, and looks extraordinary, to boot.
"MLB 2K10" surprisingly offers a weird and shaky, sloppy pitching system (flip the thumbstick this way and that, perfectly, and you still might throw a wild pitch), and comically weak artistry. It's hardly worthy of my high-definition TV.
("Major League Baseball 2K10" by Take Two retails for $60 for Xbox 360 and PS 3; $50 for Wii; $30 for PSP and PC; $20 for DS and PS 2 -- Doesn't quite play fun enough to recommend. Looks unrealistic, almost cartoonish. Challenging. Rated "E." Two and one-half stars out of four.)
("MLB '10: The Show" by Sony retails for $60 for PS 3; $40 for PSP; $30 for PS 2 -- Plays very fun. Looks terrific. Challenging. Rated "E." Four stars out of four.)
Doug Elfman's column appears Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. E-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.
NEW IN STORES
"Just Cause 2" (Square Enix) is getting good, early notices from critics for being an unusually creative take on the third-person shooter.
You play as a super soldier, tooling around a huge island nation that's controlled by a dictator. The island also has three rival military factions battling against each other for control.
Your overall goal is to blow things up and disrupt militias in order to create chaos that brings down the dictator.
So, you travel around this sprawling sandbox island, carrying out missions to destroy military bases, and killing soldiers of all stripes.
That doesn't sound so unusual for an action-adventure. But there is a remarkable creativity in the game's traveling and killing.
You have this almost supernatural grappling hook that lets you zip super fast from building to building (or any other surface in the game), not unlike Spider-Man's ability to do the same. And you have a reusable parachute.
So here's a fairly typical sequence in the game, as seen in development videos:
You base-jump off the top of a skyscraper, 2,000 feet in the air. You free-fall until you open your chute near the ground, control your landing on top of a speedboat, drive the boat to a military base, jump the boat over a ramp, then jump out of the boat midair, open your parachute, land on a building, and blow up soldiers and buildings.
If that's not unusual enough for you, consider this: You can ramp-jump a boat over giant gas tankers, then jump atop the boat's hood midjump, shoulder-launch a rocket at the tankers, jump back in the boat, and land.
Or how about this: You use your grapple to grab a bad guy, then attach the grappled bad guy to a plane, jump in the plane and fly it to a snowy mountain, where you parachute out of the plane, and the bad guy and the plane crash into the mountain.
There's a lot of other ways to take out rival soldiers. And there are 100 vehicles, from jeeps to helicopters, to command and ride while you bazooka militias to death. It's all about killing in interesting ways.
The game retails for $60 for Xbox 360 and PS 3. It's rated "M" for blood, drug reference, language, sexual themes and violence.
"Red Steel 2" (Ubisoft) tries to improve on the Wii launch title, "Red Steel," by changing almost everything about the series. This first-person shooter/swashbuckler has a new setting, a new main character and new stories.
It takes place in a fantasy desert town that looks and feels like a spaghetti Western, fused with Japan.
So you get a sword, a gun, a shotgun and your hands as weapons, as you take on tattooed samurai and cowboy villains. The game wants to be more than fighting, as it aims to deliver "Metroid Prime"-esque missions.
Important to know: You must own the Wii Motion Plus already, or spend the extra $10 to get a "Red Steel 2" that comes with Motion Plus.
The game retails for $50 for Wii ($60 if you get the version that comes with Wii MotionPlus, which is necessary for the game). It's rated "T" for animated blood, mild language, mild suggestive themes and violence.
-- By DOUG ELFMAN
