MLB 2K10

I have never been a fan of sports games. Realistic sports games, anyway, I have always liked arcadey games like NBA Jam and NFL Blitz. But when Gamestop was having a sale at its download store for $3 for a 1-month old game, MLB 2k10 by 2K Sports, it was hard to pass up. I played it and... it sucked. It was impossible to play with mouse and keyboard. With a controller, it still sucked, because the game uses its own button naming conventions: A, B, C, D. Is there even a somewhat common game controller that uses those letters for its buttons? My saitek uses numbers. Every time the game said to press A I had to remember that it really meant 3, B was 4, C was 1, and D was 2. Give me a break! Also, the game would give me "bad gesture" on my pitches no matter what I did with my control stick.

Three months later (last week) I invested in an Xbox 360 controller for my PC. As it turns out, my saitek controller sucked. The bad gestures went away immediately. The buttons in the game menus are still named weird, but at least A and B are in the right places. All I have to remember now is X = C and Y = D. The game suddenly wasn't so bad. It was worth the $3, at least.

The most impressive part of the game for me isn't the pitching or the batting (at which I am HORRIBLE), it's the announcers. It sounds like you're actually watching a game on TV. The way they talk about individual players is really cool. I imagine that they have a bunch of recorded statements and the game just fills in the correct player's name at the right place, but it sounds so natural that it makes me wonder sometimes if they really did make full statements about so many players instead of just having the game fill in the blanks. At one point in a game I managed to hit 2 homeruns in a row, and they even said something like "the pitcher looks really distraught now, after those two consecutive home runs" and they mentioned my feat again later in the game.

I played a game on July 4th and not only did a "Happy 4th of July!" graphic appear on the screen next to the scoreboard, but the announcers even mentioned it being a "special 4th of July exhibition game." I know this isn't a new thing, as I've seen it before (You Don't Know Jack: The Ride takes it as far as making fun of you for what time of the day you are playing), but it was a nice surprise nonetheless.

They must have put a lot of effort into the announcers in this game, and I'm truly impressed. I'm even considering getting 2K11 for full price if/when it comes to PC next year.