I hate not blogging every day, I mean, I make money from it, and I love writing. Yesterday I didn’t write a single word, and that’s because I’m addicted to The Show. I have an addicting personality as it is, so when I see that The Show is now available on Xbox, you’re goddamn right; I played that for 12 hours. I’ve played every sports video game under the sun, from NBA Jam to the newest 2K to NHL 94. They’ve all had their bright spots and their flaws.
I loved baseball when I was younger baseball was by far my favorite sport. I lived and died with every Yankee game, and since having an Xbox, I haven’t found a good baseball game. 2K threw its hat in the ring with Major League 2K12, and then there was R.B.I. Baseball. Both games sucked, and I was always jealous of people with Playstation. I would see videos of people playing The Show and having so much fun, and here I was with outdated games that sucked in the first place.
To say that The Show is hard would be an understatement. This isn’t an arcade baseball game where you hit a button, and boom, you hit a home run. You need perfect timing for the entire game. From pitching to hitting to fielding, everything is timed. The thing that I struggled with the most at the beginning was fielding. I would make a great play and go to throw to first, and I would throw 6 feet off the bag. I didn’t realize that you needed to hit perfectly in the middle of the bar to get a good throw. Then there’s the hitting part of the game. I was so off on my timing that my players looked like Jose Canseco out there, except without steroids pumping through their veins. I was way too early, but the nice thing is that the game tells you your timing. So after a couple of games, I was timing everything perfectly, and if only my players could actually hit home runs instead of hitting to the warning track. The pitching is fairly easy; as long as your timing is close, you’ll throw strikes.
I used to love 2K, but they’re such money whores that they’ve ruined the game. It used to be thousands of people playing against each other now; people create players and spend hundreds of dollars to make their person look cool. They keep certain teams locked until you reach certain levels, which drives me insane. I don’t want to play as the Clippers, or the Celtics let me drop 60 with Dame instead. This isn’t even talking about the mechanics, which have gotten worse every year. They tried to make the game more complicated but ruined layups and dunks. I understand that animation shouldn’t carry someone to make a contested layup, but if I’m on a breakaway and press X, I should go into a layup and not take an 8-foot jumper.
I feel like people love playing Madden to say they play Madden. I don’t ever see people actually having fun playing the game, but instead, I see clips of glitches. I don’t want to play a game where a ball can bounce off 14 people and then magically fall into a receiver’s hand. Or a player can teleport themselves through defenders because of a glitch.
The last game is NHL, and I love the NHL games, but hockey is the step-brother that nobody cares about. I might love it, but the general public doesn’t care about it, which is a shame. The people who play NHL are so fucking good that they make me want to snap controllers in half. It’s probably more of me sucking than anything.
So if you haven’t played MLB The Show, what are you waiting for? Did you instead watch the premiere of the Warzone map just to realize that it’s the same ole map? Good ole Call of Duty hyping shit up and then doing nothing about it. Were you worried that a new map would cause the file size to be even bigger? Well, they barely changed anything and somehow managed to make the game almost 200g big. Call of Duty should take notes from other Battle Royale games where you don’t need to sell limbs to buy more memory.
