Last year brought the classic Japanese Power Pro franchise to the US, and while MLB Power Pros was an untested and visually simple experience, it knocked the Wii baseball genre out of the park with incredible depth, nearly endless replayability, and some of the best traditional gameplay out there.
It may have looked like a rushed, casual-centric experience, but for anyone that took even a few minutes to sit down with the game, MLB Power Pros showed just how impressive this long running Japanese series is, and why it has remained a critically acclaimed franchise for well over a decade.
IGN were curious to see if the franchise would make a return this year, and 2K let them in on the news a few weeks back that they would indeed be seeing a return to this strange 2K/Konami/Power Pro/MLB partnership for Wii and PS2.
Don’t like sports? There’s a whole segment of games you can immediately write off, as far as you’re concerned. Or can you? You don’t have to be a comics fan to like Batman: Arkham City, and the appeal of Mario isn’t just limited to plumbing aficionados. Brad Woodling and Graham Russell are here to help with a list of games you should check out even if they have sports in them, because you’re missing out on a lot of fun.
WorthPlaying writes: "If you're yearning for the days of earlier sports titles like Tecmo Bowl and haven't been able to get into current- or last-gen sports titles due to their complexity, you might find something to love in MLB Power Pros on the PS2. It's not as deceptively simple as the cover art seems to suggest, and there are still some hardcore elements to the season setup (i.e., the trades system, overall managerial duties), but the core gameplay is about as simple as you can get. The pitching, batting and fielding mechanics are easy to figure out, which make this a pretty solid introduction to the sport for new players, and players jaded by the sheer amount of options that most sports titles bombard you with nowadays."
GamingTrend writes: "Baseball is a weird sport. There really shouldn't be anything too exciting about it, in all honesty. There's only so many things that can happen on the field, and a very strict template as to how the game should be played. There isn't half the strategy of football, the pure athleticism of soccer and basketball, or the brutality of hockey, but there's still something charming about baseball that's missing in many other sports.
For those reasons, there's something about baseball that always eludes game developers as well. What do people like about baseball? The home run? The ballpark ambiance? 100 mile-per-hour fastballs? There are very few games that get baseball right, and I'm happy to say that MLB Power Pros 2008 is one of them. Where does it excel? Where does it fall short? And why does a game with such cartoonish graphics feel more like baseball than a lot of more "realistic" baseball games?"
