MLB 09: The Show for Playstation 3

The MLB franchise has been a quality franchise for a number of year even dating back to its Playstation days and this year's version is no different.

Many players who are familiar with the series will feel at ease with this year's version immediately. The menus and gameplay are mostly similar to last year's version. Some of the new aspects to the game are the training modes on the bases which give a good indication of how to steal bases and other training aspects in baseball.

The pitch analysis is a good feature to the game and gives a player a good indication into where their weaknesses and strengths are.

Online mode for the most part remains unchanged. Going through it, I saw the ability to scout potential opponents or league members in game. Online gameplay is smooth and there were very few slowdowns, if any. The only thing I saw different than offline gameplay was hitting. You have to time your swing even sooner to make contact and the bat-to-ball contact does not look as crisp as it does offline. That alone does not ruin the online experience.

Offline play is simply superb. The commentary does have some new lines but there are a lot of lines from two years ago that still sneak their way into the game. Overall, it is great, though. I like that the commentary references things and pitches that happened earlier in the game. It shows some real creativeness and solid planning on the part of the developers. The ballparks are all very authentic and updates. Yankee Stadium and Citi Field are both in the game and look great. Graphically, the game looks great overall.

One of the bad things about this game is that it is only available on the Playstation platform. So if you have an Xbox 360 or Wii, you are screwed. That's a shame that owners on those platforms only have the far inferior MLB 2K9 to choose from.

Overall, MLB 09 is a tremendous game and should be recommended for any baseball fan. However, if you are not a baseball fan, you might tire of it at some point because of the time it takes to do a game. It can take an hour or more just to do a 7-inning game. That may be one reason, other than that it's baseball and not Madden, why MLB 09 will be a game that won't be as universally popular. Still a game to check out, though.