MLB: The Show ’11 Early Impressions

By TheNaturalMevs on March 8, 2011

Last night I snagged a copy of MLB The Show ’11 at midnight. Last year’s game was the greatest baseball game I’ve ever played. So what were the early impressions of this game? Today was set to be a day long celebration here at Diamond Hoggers. I’ll admit that I played until about 3 am last night (and since this game is so life-like, that was only about two full games. Here’s what I registered in the way of early impressions before before my girlfriend emerged from our room and started telling me that it was time to put the controller down for the night.

*’All-Star’ difficulty mode used to be absolutely sick how accurate it was right out of the box to real-life baseball you see on television every night. Not anymore. I knew something was off last night when I hit six home runs on Opening Day against the Brewers. It would have been three with Johnny Gomes single-handed, but Corey Hart made a catch that took one away.

*Then I started to realize that it wasn’t just a good day at the office. In my homer happy game, a total of like 12 balls flew out of park for both teams, including a bomb by Ramon Hernandez to cut the deficit to 9-8 which was the final.

*Then I fired up a game between the Braves and Nationals. Who is on the mound for the Nats? None other than Stephen Strasburg. I had downloaded the new roster update from online, so The Show developers must not have gotten the memo that the phenom won’t be pitching this year. Nonetheless, I wanted to see what he had.

*He threw hard, but I messed him up badly. I mean, I put like 7 or 8 runs on Strasburg; whereas in last year’s version on my wonderful ‘All-Star’ difficulty he’s likely to 2-hit you and strike you out 13 times. The home runs you earn, and they feel valuable to you. This year, it’s the nightmare that was 2K Sports baseball all over again. As the game went on, the Braves (controlled by me) hit 7 home runs. Jason Heyward hit two, and they were on balls he tapped. I didn’t time them up particularly well. Just, ridiculous. It wasn’t even really fun at this point. For shits sakes, I hit a backside bomb with Alex freagin’ Gonzalez to go up 5-3. That shouldn’t happen.

*I’m told that “The Show 11 developers have already said that they made the ‘All-Star’ difficulty easier and ‘Hall of Fame’ harder.” Well, the problem is this; there needs to be some in between. Because the experience on ‘Hall of Fame’ is that you can get your 12 hits on a good night but it’s damn near impossible to do anything but single and manufacture any more than 2 runs or so. So it’s either always too easy, or always too hard. Simply put; it’s 2K baseball and everything I hated about it.

So instead of celebrating what should be the greatest baseball game of all time, I basically feel like I might have wasted money and I’m wondering why they went and ruined a really good game. Some people might not notice it; but a guy like me who is a wizard and played the versions from the previous two years definitely notices right from the onset. Why fix something if it’s not broken? I don’t get it.

*Otherwise, I’m wondering where you can turn off auto-save.

I’ll hopefully be able to add some positive news and I’m going to try some stuff tonight to try and make the game a little better. Otherwise, I’m looking to sell it at $55–first come first serve. And thus another year without baseball.

Way to go the route of Madden, SCEA. Take something invincible and screw it all up. Oh, and the soundtrack sucks as well.

Just so you all know that I’m not a chronic complainer, here’s what I had to say about last year’s MLB the Show. So I’m just calling it like I see it.