MLB The Show ’17 – A True Review of a Broken Baseball Video Game

With video game reviews – it’s as crooked as media and their involvement with political agendas. Every site has to post shining reviews of games, and they have to paint the game in a great light because they don’t want to rock the boat with companies like SCEA San Diego or EA Sports Tiburon. They walk a fine line with anything negative because they don’t want their relationship with that company to become damaged. They throw a ‘best ever 9.0 rating!’ on their review and call it a day.

I’m here to tell you today that the greatest baseball game ever made is MLB the Show, but MLB The Show ’17 is completely and totally bugged and broken, doomed at it’s outset.

I’ve played thousands of hours of this game since 2010. It’s always been smooth right out of the box. It always seemed to play a realistic game of baseball. I’ve played it sadly long enough to realize when something feels wonky or ‘off’. And this year’s version of the game is so broken, it’s going to end up just like all the Madden’s of the past five years. It’s unplayable in it’s current state, and that’s a matter of opinion from someone who has been it’s biggest supporter for a half decade plus.

The screenshot you see above came from an 11-10 ballgame at Comerica Park. There were exactly THIRTEEN home runs hit in that game. Seven by the Tigers, and six by me; the Red Sox. It doesn’t matter what difficulty you put the game on. It doesn’t matter what you do with the sliders (in my opinion, this leaves you constantly tinkering and further breaks a game more). This game is a homer-happy arcade style slugfest that in no way resembles real life baseball. It is a complete broken mess and the developers like SCEA’s Ramone Russell have continued to be silent and ignore numerous requests for answers on why the hitting is so bugged.

Don’t believe me? The proof is right here over at the Operation Sports forums. There are 47 pages of discussion at the time of this post and the developers like Ramone Russell of SCEA read this forum constantly and offer feedback. How many responses has be posted in that thread? Zero.

You’ll notice some games that you play, the homer bug is not out. You’ll lose 2-0 or win 3-0 on a couple solo shots on one side or another, ho-hum they want this to appear as normal. But the home runs you’ll see hit are going incredible distances. It’s nothing to see a ball hit 540 feet to the farthest reaches out of a stadium. In fact, there have been reports of Brandon Belt hitting a 595 foot steroid shot that cleared McCovey Cove and went on to a bank over the cove. The best part was screenshots showed he hit it off the end of the bat!

It’s nothing to have Chris Sale or David Price or Clayton Kershaw give up four, five, or six home runs in an outing. Things might seem normal for a while, but then a slap hitter like Jarrod Dyson drops a bomb backside 490 feet on a pitch 3 inches out of the zone.

Bottom line is this: the company has catered to arcade-style gameplay and is no longer a baseball simulation which is what made it so great. They’re guilty of the same crime as EA Sports with Madden: they’re so invested in Diamond Dynasty that they wanted the hitting improved online so they juiced up the ball with physics that make the baseball behave like a fucking vending machine bouncy ball off the bat. So 500 foot home runs are no longer special, just when you think the game is right, you’re going to get into an 8-6 homer showdown where the last two run shot wins the game. It totally sucks. It totally sucks that they don’t address it. It feels fraudulent and I hope someone files a lawsuit against them for a broken product they released.

You think that in all those hours of testing – no dipshit ever thought to say – ‘hey this ball flew 600 fucking feet, you don’t see that too much’. They knew this was going on, they know it’s going on now; and the silence is deafening.

I’m too old for video games. This was one of the last games I really ever enjoyed, and now when I turn it on I play a few innings and feel bad for wasting minutes of my life on something so stupid. Last year’s game as so smooth I completed about two full seasons – one with the Astros and one with the Dodgers. I won’t play 20 games this season in full it’s so bad.

So there’s your review of MLB ’17 the Show, the arcade slugfest that feels like Triple Play or something out of the 2K Sports series where the first baseman would pull his fucking foot off the bag; causing your buddies to leave your house they were so pissed off at it happening.

I’ll never buy MLB The Show again and I think I’m done with sports games. This was the one sacred game left and it’s completely ruined.

Rant over. Back to real world problems and real world baseball where I don’t see Lorenzo Cain hitting 575 foot shots like it’s nothing.