First-Person Shouter

As a PC Gamer with no next-gen console, I generally don’t feel like I’m missing a lot in the way of games.  Sure, I’d love to check out the odd Little Big Planet and peep your Killzone 2, but for the most part, nearly all the games I really want to play are represented on the PC.  There is one big, gaping hole in this regard, however:  baseball.  PCs just can’t match the consoles when it comes to baseball sims.

This past weekend, I downloaded the demo for MLB 2K9, which lets you play three innings between the Tampa Bay Rays and the Philadelphia Phillies.  After playing those three innings about eleven times in a row, I realized I may have found at least some of what I was looking for.

Your closer's rapidly faltering composure is sponsored by Pepsi.

MLB 2K9 retails for just $20, and that price tag is important because it lets me forgive a lot of the game’s shortcomings.  It’s easy to see why it’s so much cheaper than the console versions just by reading the box : it doesn’t contain a lot of the features the console versions do, such as “Living Rosters”, which replicates real, current MLB rosters and reflects them in your game.  PC gamers will have to manually manage their rosters if they want to stay up to date with the real world.

But let’s leave the lengthy list of have-nots for a bit and focus on the good stuff.

Replay mode lets you pause, rewind, and view the previous play from whatever angle you like, so you can confirm that, yes, the ump did blow the call. Delgado was safe! Open your eyes, Blue!

The games begin just like they do on TV — the announcers welcome you to the park, you see the pitchers warming up and players tossing balls around the infield.  You get a peek at the line-ups and a rundown on defense.  All the little details of a game at the park are captured — the crowd will cheer and heckle players (often by name) and even fight for foul balls hit into the stands (on the lower-levels, anyway — the cheap seats are filled with flattened 2D fans.) 

Most of the player animations are great — a batter swinging at a bad pitch will shake his head, adjust his batting gloves, and stomp around the batter’s box.  They’ll even argue with the umps over calls.  Pitchers will stroll off the mound and pace around between pitches, infielders will try to fake out base runners by thumping their mitts behind them and then repositioning themselves.  All that’s missing is the constant spitting and nut-scratching.

Batting isn’t too hard — you have to set your batter before he can swing, and you can aim the bat inside, outside, high, or low if you wish.  While on defense, your catcher will set up a target and call for a pitch, which you can shake off if you don’t like it.  If your pitcher starts getting erratic or fatigued, you can warm up replacements in the pen or have the manager visit the mound to try to calm him down (though it can also rattle him) or just kill time until you bring in your reliever.  Pitchers tend to get tired early — after about fifty pitches, but since most at-bats are over within a few pitches (even low-scoring games tend to have tons of hits) it still translates to about seven innings work.

The game is excellent at guessing which plays you’d like to see in instant replay, and will show you clips from various angles with commentary from the announcers.  You can also pause the game and use the replay feature yourself:  it’s neat for checking out what just happened on the field from any vantage point you’d like — pause, rewind, and view that close play at home or that diving catch to your heart’s content.  In this clip I put on YouTube, we can watch Jose Reyes advance on a pop-up from the viewpoint of the baseball.

The post-game wrap-up is fun, too.  It will show you replays of what it deems the game’s best hits or defensive plays, and you can also revisit scenes of your top players’ best performances (though sometimes from odd angles).

The game even features bat boys, though I'm thinking about trading this one to the Cubs for cash and a groundskeeper to be named later.

Of course, this is a cheap console port, so there are plenty of places where the game is lacking.  For instance:

It’s the Mets at Cincinnati for the 2009 season opener.  Bottom of the eighth, and the Mets starting pitcher, Johan Santana, is still on the mound, having only allowed four hits and no Reds runners past second.  K-Rod is warming up in the pen to protect the two-run lead that has stood since the first inning when David Wright crushed an 0-2 fastball into the left field stands with Jose Reyes on first.

Two outs.  Santana allows a single, then another, bringing the go-ahead run to the plate.  A visit to the mound from the manager, Jerry Manuel, seems to have calmed him down a bit, and Santana looks in for the sign.  He kicks and delivers.

Then Santana, the rest of the players, the fans, and the stadium all disappear and I’m starting at my desktop wallpaper.  Crash.

I’m not terribly worried since I remember, while setting up the game, I enabled the “Autosave” feature.  I figured it must save the game between innings, since there’s a moment or two of black screen when the teams change sides.

No dice.  When I restart, any record of the first game of the season is completely gone.  It turns out, “Autosave” means it saves the game only upon completion, when any normal person would already save the game on their own.  What’s auto about that, exactly?

I figure I can just manually save between innings, but again, I’m out of luck.  There is no “Save” option, just a “Save and Quit” option.  So, anytime I want to save a game in progress, I have to save, quit the game, return to the main menu, reload the franchise, and restart the game.

It’s not terribly annoying or time consuming – it’s about eight different mouseclicks but probably only takes about thirty seconds to complete — but having to do it nine times per game over a 162 game season means I’ll be performing this pointless routine some 1,400 times.  It’s not like I want to save it every time I get a hit or reload it every time I throw a bad pitch, but as a simple safeguard against lost progress due to crashes, it’s a bit of a nuisance.

While repeatedly reloading your game, you can relive a few wonderful moments of baseball history with some trivia.

What’s more, saving during an inning can cause some peculiarities.  In the fifth inning of the second game between the Mets and Reds, Reyes was on second base and Luis Castillo was on first, both having reached on seeing-eye singles.  David Wright stepped up to the plate with no outs.  I realized I hadn’t saved the game between innings, so I decided I’d better do it then.  I went through the rigmarole, and when I got back into the game, Reyes was on first and Wright was at the plate.  There were still no outs, but Luis Castillo, and his at-bat, had somehow vanished.  So, no useful autosave, no real save, and Save & Quit seems unreliable.  MLB 2K9 blows more saves than Armando Benitez.

It's steamroller day at Marlins Stadium. The first 10,000 fans get squashed flat.

The other main nuisance is the controls scheme.  The game supports keyboard and mouse controls, but even when selected, the on-screen instructions and practice tutorials still only display controller commands.  I don’t have dual analog sticks or shoulder buttons, and the game clearly knows this, but all the in-game instuctions are displayed as if I were using a controller.

You can look in the control setup menu for a translation:  for instance, to call the manager to the mound for a conference with a jittery pitcher, the game tells you to press B7.  The controls menu tells you B7, in keyboardese, is the Page Up button.  Why this can’t be displayed on the screen during the game is beyond me.  I had to create a cheat sheet to avoid going back and forth between the game and menus, and anything involving the analog sticks is still a bit murky: after winning three straight against Cincy and sweeping the Marlins in Florida, I’m still fairly sure I’m not pitching properly.

The actual game controls are a little wonky, especially while fielding.  On a long pop-fly, a fielder will automatically run under the ball, but as soon as I try to control him manually, he will slow down.  Changing a player’s direction while running will generally cause him to skid to a stop before veering in the new direction, which often makes chasing down balls an embarrassing ordeal.  On the other hand, throwing balls to the cut-off man or the correct base is easy, and baserunning isn’t too big a deal to control properly.

The play-by-play (by Gary Thorne, who is great) and color commentary (by Steve Phillps, who is less-so), as in most sports games, is a combination of clever, enjoyable, repetitive, inappropriate,  and downright annoying.  I enjoy it for a while, maybe an inning or two – I think it generally does an admirable job of quickly assessing the situation on the field and delivering some dialogue that mostly fits the action — but when it misses it becomes glaringly obvious there’s been a hiccup in the matrix.  Replace a pitcher with a pinch hitter and the announcers still go on as if the pitcher is at bat, expressing shock if he rips a single.  At one point my pitcher gave up a triple, and they commented that he had lost his stuff and it might be time to yank him.  It was the first inning.  They also give advice: recommending what pitch to throw, for instance, but it’s hard to tell if this is a stock clip with no relevance to what is going on, or if it’s specific to the guy on the mound and the batter at the plate.

What the game, and probably most sports games need, is not just a commentary volume slider but also a commentary frequency slider: I’d like color commentary every now and then, but not after every goddamn pitch, especially as most of it is unreliable and repetitive.  Just because a player hit a first-pitch fastball does not mean he is a first-pitch fastball hitter, and just because a fielder bobbled a ball does not mean he committed an error.  Constant, vague commentary is bad enough when watching a ballgame;  it can be downright infuriating when playing one.

And then there are the occasional gameplay bugs.  Probably about once a game, there’s a little WTF moment.  In one case, I was batting with a runner on first.  There was a pitchout and a throw to second despite my not attempting a steal.  A few moments later, my runner slowly trotted to second base and despite the second baseman having had the ball in his glove for a good ten seconds, my runner was called safe without a slide.  Another time, I hit a long bomb to the warning track.  The outfielder missed it, then spent about ten seconds trying to run through the outfield wall while the ball lay a few feet away. 

In the anther game, I fielded a scalding grounder at second base and tossed it to first almost before the batter got out of the box, but he was called safe when he eventually made it there.  And, a couple times, I’ve seen runners not advancing when they should, and one dope trying to turn a double into an inside-the-park homerun.

Still, I’m mostly able to forgive these shortcomings for the $20 price tag.  The game is a lot of fun to play, despite the bugs and annoyances, and with the few baseball options available to PC Gamers, I think MLB 2K9 is, for the most part, worth the low cost.  Hardcore baseball sim fans will probably find it lacking, but if you’re looking for something realitively easy to play and can turn a blind eye to some of the bugs, at least check out the demo.