MLB 10: The Show is a complete rip off... and that's a good thing! - adembroski's Blog

adembroski's Blog

MLB 10: The Show is a complete rip off... and that's a good thing!

Posted on May 21, 2010 at 10:17 PM.

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I finally bit the bullet. Tired of no decent baseball game on the XBox 360, I traded it in, and I'm a PS3 man from here until the next generation.

Of course, with my shiny new (used) PS3, I also have MLB 10: The Show, and it's quite the trip down memory lane.

This game should be convicted of grand theft: baseball, and that's a wonderful thing.

Since about 2000, baseball video gaming has been in a golden era, with every year producing at least one absolute gem of a game. While it has fallen since, the MLB 2kX series was solid during the PS2 era, but it was the attention to realism that came with the High Heat baseball series that set off the decade of greatness.

High Heat concentrated solely on realism. There wasn't much for presentation and the mechanics were basic, but for the first time you really felt like making baseball decisions would result in realistic results. High Heat 2004 was the pinnacle of the series, and 3DO was sadly laid to rest after it's release. Microsoft purchased the code base and rights to High Heat, and promtly sat on it (just to piss off you XBox 360 owners a bit more; yes, as a first party publisher, Microsoft absolute can legally dust off the High Heat engine and release a baseball title. They simply refuse to do so.)

In the wake of the death of High Heat came MVP Baseball 2005 from EA Sports. A game of innovation to say the least, never before had the player felt so in control of a baseball game while still staying true to the sport and the players in it. High Heat's player attributes dictated virtually everything, but in MVP there were control schemes to allow the player to have much more influence... the player ratings acted almost as a handicap. And it was 100% transparent. You could always see what you were doing wrong. The timing based hitting mechanic combined with slow-motion replay of your swing giving precise feedback on your timing, plus a pitching meter that The Show players would recognize meant that you could always see why you just missed that outside corner, or that long ball hooked just foul.

Enter Exclusivity. Just after EA signed it's exclusive deal with the NFL, 2k Sports did the same with MLB. However, it wasn't quite as exclusive. This deal did not apply to first party publishers... meaning Microsoft and Sony were still in the game.

What did Sony do? They looked at two previous great baseball titles... MVP and High Heat... and damn near copied them directly.

High Heat used a location/rating based pitching mechanic that is mirrored exactly by The Show's "Classic" pitching interface. MVP used a meter based pitching mechanic that shares a lot in common with The Show's default "Meter" pitching interface.

High Heat used a plate coverage based hitting system with player ratings largely determining where the ball went (while timing did play a major part as well). MVPs hitting system was purely timing based, with the player ratings dictating plate coverage. The Show combines these two factors, with plate coverage being less influential than in High Heat, but much more so than in MVP.

Fielding is classic MVP... preloaded throwing meter and all.

Essentially, SCEA took the best of the best, and the concentrated on delivering the most immersion experience to date in a baseball game. Kudos to you, Sony. Sometimes, shameless larceny is a virtue!