I should start this mini review with a disclaimer: I had high hopes for 2K Sports’ MLB series after I read that EA’s Ben Brinkman (who had worked on MVP Baseball) was coming over to 2K to work on MLB. Unfortunately, now that I’ve been playing MLB 2K8 on my Xbox 360 for the past week and a half, I have to say that I’m extremely disappointed.
There are so many problems with this game it isn’t funny. I’m sick and tired of waiting all season for a new baseball game only to find that the new one is just as crappy as the last. Especially after they hype it up all year, talking about how great it’s going to be. This game gets an F in my book.
My personal commentary on the series is this: They’ve lost sight of what really matters in a baseball game, and that’s just freakin’ PLAYING BASEBALL. They spend way too much time on new features (like the stupid baseball card simulator) and making the uniforms ripple in the wind, and not enough time just making the game work. Until they refocus on game play, this series will continue to suck, year after year.
The good:
Graphics look good
Presentation looks nice as well
Current rosters
You can play baseball
ESPN News is integrated into the bottom of the screen, just like a real broadcast
The bad:
Tons and tons of bugs:
Mid-game announcements routinely get things wrong: like announcers talking about hitting an inside the park homer, yet I’ve never hit one
Presentation stats are often wrong: when I went to the post season in Franchise mode the first game showed that the pitchers had a 0-0 win-loss record (like they would in the first post season game), but they showed ERAs and strike outs from the regular season
Half the time the new pitching system won’t recognize my controller inputs and will fail to execute the second half of a pitch, resulting in an extremely annoying meatball
The new pitching systems SUCKS big time. I’m almost always throwing meatballs.
Base running controls suck more than they did last time, especially with more than one runner on base. I’m constantly sending runners to the wrong place. Oh and this time it takes twice as long for the runner to stop and go back to a base
I still hit more homers and doubles than base hits
The AI seems to throw way more strikes than balls
That could be because its twice as hard to figure out if a pitch will be a ball than last time
Fielding a player in the first couple seconds is weird, often I’ll be controlling the wrong guy by default and will miss a routine ground ball.
After a visit to the mound I’ll hit A to skip the cutscene, but the game will both skip the cut scene and throw a meatball pitch down the center of the plate (when using the 2K7 pitching controls)
Whoa, check out this crazy attempted landing of an A320 aircraft at Hamburgairport in Germany. It’s amazing the pilot got so close to the ground, he was way past the front of the runway by the time he touched down. According to someone in the comments the winds were clocked gusting to 150 mph (130 knots)!
I haven’t really been listening to too much new music lately, but I have gotten a couple new tracks worth sharing.
The first comes from a song that I’ve heard recently on KROQ. It’s made by a band named Finger Eleven and has a catchy chorus and nice hard rock riffs. It’s called Paralyzer and it’s quite cool.
I heard this next song while watching the movie, Die Another Day. It’s has almost a metal sound to it, with somewhat screaming lyrics. But it also has a chorus that gets stuck in my head. Anyway, it’s called I’m So Sick, by Flyleaf. This song is also featured on Rock Band, it’s fun to play it! I’ll be blogging soon about Rock Band. I love it.
As always, you can listen to the new songs in the last.fm player on my website.
I’m sure you’ve heard about the Optimus Maximus keyboard by now, but, until I saw this video today, I thought it was just vapor-ware. This has got to be the most amazing keyboard ever. I can’t wait to see one in person!
Toshiba announced today that they will, “no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders.” according to this Engadget article.
So Blu-ray it is I suppose. I’m hoping that we can just start to download 1080p soon though. I’ve been dreaming of a multi-terabyte storage array with a Mac Mini sitting at each TV in my house to hook into it. That’s not really far off as XBMC on OS X continues to improve. Hopefully they will get 1080p decoding working on currrent gen Mac Mini’s. That would be sweet!
I just tried the latest release of XBMC on OS X (0.1.1) today. Coming along very, very well. This release seems to be solid as can be. It supports the mouse now and in my 10 minutes of testing, worked great!
I’m thinking about moving my Mac Mini into the living room now.
I still find it hard to find good content in HD though. Most of the stuff says HDTV, but its only taken from HDTV, it isn’t HD itself. Even when I do find an HD rip though, it rarely has the higher quality sound with it. I guess I’ll have to wait awhile longer before I can finally throw away my Cable and Satellite boxes.
“Toward the end of February, HD DVDs in your Saved Queue will automatically be changed to standard definition DVDs. Then toward the end of this year, all HD DVDs in your Queue will be changed to standard definition DVDs.”
No more HD-DVD from Netflix. It comes as no surprise though, I’ve had HD-DVD movies sitting at the top of my queue for months and never gotten them. I think that this is just another chink in HD-DVD’s last stand. It won’t be too long now before HD-DVD is off the shelf.
Now, If I could just get my hands on a sub $200 blu-ray player
I wrote a simple chkconfig compatible firewall init script for CentOS/RedHat/Fedora based Linux systems. It is based on the Quick n’ Dirty script from vpslink’s wiki.
It will setup iptables firewall rules allowing anyone to access user defined ports (22,80 by default). It also has the ability to whitelist and blacklist IP’s. I’ve tested it with chkconfig on CentOS 5.
Ugh!!! My stupid Xbox 360 just started throwing out the red ring of death on me again. This is my 3rd dead Xbox 360. At least this time it’s still under warranty so it won’t cost me anything to replace. Well, except 3 weeks of no Rock Band
Sorry to all my friends and family that wanted to play this game with me. I guess it will be 3-4 weeks before we can plan another Rock Band party
I wrote a simple chkconfig compatible firewall init script for CentOS/RedHat/Fedora based Linux systems. It is based on the 
Sorry to all my friends and family that wanted to play this game with me. I guess it will be 3-4 weeks before we can plan another Rock Band party 