MLBPowerProsReview 2008
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MLB Power Pros 2008 Review
- by Will Willis (Wyl)
Pros: MLB Life mode is a welcome addition to the North American game, new Success mode story, excellent game play physics from 2007 returns with some refinements, amazing statistical depth and attention to detail.
Cons: Season mode offers little more than a roster update over 2007, most community feature requests ignored, a few frustrating issues with the new content, brutally bad play-by-play announcing returns unchanged from 2007.
Bottom Line: MLB Power Pros 2008 has a lot going for it, despite some annoying flaws.
Overview
Konami and 2K Sports team up again this year to bring the MLB Power Pros franchise to the North American market. MLB Power Pros is based on a long running series of games in Japan, and last year’s North American debut gained popularity mostly on word of mouth, rather quietly becoming one of the best games of the year. The 2008 edition retains much of the appeal of 2007, while making a few refinements to the gameplay and adding a substantial amount of new content in the form of MLB Life mode and an all new Success mode that not only has a new story line, but also has fairly different mechanics of play than the 2007 version. The Season, Exhibition, and League modes are essentially the same as last year.
To put this review in context, my own experience with MLB Power Pros is extensive. I put hundreds of hours into the 2007 Wii version, generating about 50 Success Mode players (25 or so are posted on my website here - http://www.inside-corner.com/mlbpp.html) and playing through Season Mode with 5 different teams. I held off on reviewing MLB Power Pros 2008 until I was able to spend several days with the game (about 35 hours to this point) and make sure I was past a surface level familiarity with it. I’ve spent a lot of time with the new modes, and posted one of the first Success Mode player passwords (Wii) available on the Internet - http://www.inside-corner.com/mlbpp/mlbppworld.jpg.
One of the most common questions gamers will ask is “is this worth buying if I have last year’s game?” Therefore, this review will make comparisons between the 2007 and 2008 versions where appropriate, and pointing out new features to help that decision.
Success Mode
For most fans of the RPG-like Success Mode in 2007, buying MLB Power Pros 2008 is a no-brainer. While the story this year features you and Marvin and a new cast of characters starting out in AA ball rather than playing for the Powerful University Tulips, it is not a continuation of last year’s story. The main character you play has a different backstory than the 2007 main character. The structure of the story has changed as well. In 2007 you played 3 seasons, with July – February having one turn per month and March – June having 4 turns per month. If my math is right, it added up to 87 turns total if you made it to the Superstars game at the end of year 3. In 2008 you instead play two years, a year in AA and a year in AAA. To make up for one less year, the timeline always advances one week at a time rather than a month at a time in the offseason. That ends up being 76 turns total, which would be a bit shorter than 2007’s story except that in the new Success mode you can gain extra turns through “carryover points,” which can be acquired through random events or just earned over time. With the extra turns the actual length of Success mode is about the same as in 2007.
My biggest complaint with Success mode in 2007 went unresolved in 2008 as well – only having a single save slot. In my household both myself and my 10-year old son love Success mode. It is ridiculous that other game modes like Season and MLB Life have 3 saves lots, but Success mode only has one. That means if one of us starts a Success mode player and gets busy/sidetracked and doesn’t finish right away, the other has to either wait it out or convince the person with the unfinished game to let them delete it so they can play. There’s just no need for that problem to exist.
In addition to the new mechanics of managing carryover points, practice has changed in that the points you earn are based on a one-arm bandit style draw of 5 cards, either “OK” or “XX.” The more OK cards you get, the more points you earn in that practice to apply to skills. If you draw 5 “XX” cards, you get injured. In 2007, getting injured could land you in the hospital for 3, 5, or 8 weeks and could be catastrophic for your player. In 2008 you don’t end up in the hospital, but getting injured reduces your coach and scout evaluations. That can be catastrophic in its own right because in general it is harder to get a player through to the end successfully. Throughout Success mode if your scout and/or coach eval is below a threshold (higher threshold in year 2) shown on your data screen, a bad performance or injury will lead to a “you’re fired” game over situation. In addition to those changes, the fate card system of 2007 is gone in 2008. You now just select from a multiple choice list of responses rather than having to manage your fate card inventory and hoping you have the card you need for a given event. I’m undecided on whether I like that change or not. On the one hand it simplifies the game somewhat, but on the other hand that might be for the best since it is harder to finish successfully. Success mode in 2008 feels slower paced and with fewer side story arcs than 2007. Perhaps the music contributes to that feel, the main theme throughout the game is more subdued/less energetic than last year’s.
When you make it to the end of Success mode and get a major league contract, you finish up the details of your player and get a password that you can share with other MLB Power Pros players. And therein lies one of the biggest frustration for Power Pros fans - the lack of password compatibility either between 2007 and 2008 versions or between PS2 and Wii platforms. One of the top feature requests for 2008 was to fix this issue, and it went ignored. So Wii owners of the 2007 game can’t import the Success mode players they made into 2008 Season or MLB Life modes, nor can they share 2008 passwords back and forth with PS2 owners. Either one would have been an improvement. It can be argued that locking the player passwords to a particular year’s game helps maintain the replay value of previous editions, but fans of the series will play previous versions anyway for the different storylines. But that aside, the significant changes in playing style from 2007 make MLB Power Pros 2008 a worthy buy for Success mode fans.
MLB Life Mode
MLB Life mode, based on the “My Life” mode in the Japanese Pawapuro games, is new to MLB Power Pros this year. In it, you play a single player through up to a 20 year career. It is a cross between Season and Success modes. You have the choice of playing an existing major leaguer, bringing forward a player created in Success mode, or creating a new rookie from scratch. Hardcore save/reload style Success mode players will likely find it less satisfying to bring their maxed out players into MLB Life, because of the balance of the game it becomes very easy to dominate even on the hardest difficulty levels. At that point practicing to boost skills and watching your player’s growth over his career is far less interesting. Then again, without the need to practice you can spend all of your free time on hobbies and socializing. MLB Life starts in spring training 2008. If you play a rookie (Success mode player or create one from scratch at the beginning of MLB Life), you are fighting for a roster spot and have the possibility of starting the year in either AAA or on the major league roster depending on your performance in the spring training games. If you start in AAA, performing well will earn you a call up during the season. In a game I played, I started in AAA and got called up in mid-April after hitting .600 over the first couple of weeks.
Like Season mode, you can simulate games or play them. The difference in playing them is that it is like the “follow player” feature of Season mode where the games are simulated except when you set an option to watch a specific player. What that means is that if you play a fielder, you control each of your at-bats and everything else is simulated. If you play a pitcher, you control yourself in the innings you pitch, and the rest of the game is simulated. It takes 3-5 minutes per game as a fielder. If you play every game and don’t skip entire games through simulating, it will take about 10 hours of real-time per year (start of spring training one year until the start of spring training the following year). Playing a starting pitcher will take about 10-15 minutes per game. So there is a substantial amount of gameplay available.
MLB Life follows a two turns per day structure for most of the season, afternoon and night. On game days you’ll have a turn for the game (either a day or night game), and if it is a travel day that turn won’t be a choice either. But on regular game days you have either an afternoon or a night where you can choose from a number of activities – practicing on your own to boost skills, engaging in a hobby (different hobbies can boost skills) like fishing, darts, or chess among others, hanging out with teammates you’ve become friends with, going out with a lady friend/wife, chatting with your coaches, talk to your agent or equipment sponsor rep, or just resting to recover vitality. On off days you’ll engage in one activity all day, getting the benefit of having done it twice.
Like Season and Success mode, player performance in MLB Life mode is influenced by motivation level. And that brings up the most significant flaw in MLB Life. My experience and that of other gamers has shown that motivation going up or down is not tied to actual game performance or events in the player’s life. Instead, the developers chose to simulate the ups and downs of a long major league season by affixing the motivation scale to a timeline. In other words, you might start the season with pink (highest) motivation and you’ll watch it go down to purple (lowest) no matter what you do or don’t do, then it will climb back up to pink, and continue on that roller coaster throughout the season regardless of your performance. It’s very frustrating, because you know weeks in advance where your motivation will be and if it is going down and will be purple at an inopportune time there is nothing you can do to stop it. It definitely hinders the immersion factor.
The clumsy way of handling motivation can be viewed as an attempt to balance the game, and another balancing effort is how player progress is handled. In order to keep your player from getting too good too quickly (or possibly preventing your abilities from reaching “all A’s” ) the game has some arbitrary restrictions built in. For example, a rookie 3B I started out with a 3 (G) CON ability and the “amazing bat control strength” reached 9 (D) in his second year, and would go no further. A note on his profile said his bat control had peaked. Not sure yet if that means it will never go above 9, or if the game is designed to hold the player back so he won’t hit 15 (A) until he’s been in the league 6-7 years.
Another flaw in playing MLB Life is noticed when you’re playing every game and not simulating. The coaching AI is bad when it comes to managing pitching rotations and substituting players. I’ve run into multiple instances of the same swingman starting two games in a row against me, even though he’s panting (tired) in the first inning. Or a swingman relieving in one game and then starting the next game. Closers sometimes get used as middle relievers, it’s a bit off-putting to see Riviera, Papelbon, Hoffman, or similar established closer pitch the 5th and 6th innings of a game. You see lots of pinch runners and pinch hitters, even when it doesn’t make any sense. It’s the same problem that plagued Season mode last year, and it is the same in both Season and MLB Life modes this year.
Season Mode
For 2007 owners, there is nothing new to see with Season mode. It is exactly the same in MLB Power Pros 2008 as it was in 2007, even down to the text you read at the beginning when you get your GM job. The play-by-play announcing of Jack Merluzzi is as brutal as last year and still worthy of a quick silencing, where you can then listen to the PA announcer mispronounce quite a few names. However, there are two key refinements that many Power Pros fans will rejoice over. The first is that “Arrange Team in Season Mode” is now unlocked from the beginning, so you don’t have to accumulate 13 awards and 100,000 PP points to unlock it from the Shop like you did in 2007. In Season mode you still have the option of playing the 32 team expansion mode or the regular 30 team mode. With Arrange Team you can make an original team off of the “Arrange” menu on the game’s main screen and then use that team in Season mode, either as an expansion team or as a replacement for an existing team in the 30 team mode. You still have the option when setting up a new Season mode league to do a complete “dream draft” or just take the rosters as is (and add in any Success mode players you want to your team).
The other great change is that you can now change the difficulty settings during a season. One of the common frustrations with Season mode is 2007 is that you’d get a decent ways into a season and the CPU difficulty level you were playing against would become too easy as you got better. When that happened you couldn’t adjust the difficulty setting in-season, you had to either finish out the season at the current difficulty level, start over, or just sim out huge chunks of the current season to get it over with. While many settings can still only be changed during the off-season, fortunately you can now adjust difficulty levels in-season as needed.
In terms of gameplay, the pitches seem a little faster and the breaking balls a bit sharper in 2008. Fly balls seem to fly more true as well, with less of the ball shadow making a radical curve as the ball comes back down. The developers also fixed one of my biggest annoyances with 2007 – batting stances where the bat hangs over the plate are more usable in 2008 in the default behind-the-catcher camera view because the bat now has some transparency to it. In 2007 you bat would simply obscure your view of the flight of the pitch, particularly if the pitcher threw from the same side of the plate you were batting. That isn’t a problem anymore. Also, a nice little refinement in 2008 is that hot/cold hitting zones briefly display on the screen at the start of an at-bat. You can turn that off if you like, but it’s a nice little feature.
I’ve noticed with hitting in 2008 that you get quick pitched a lot when the opposing pitcher is working out of the stretch. It definitely ramps up the difficulty of hitting with men on base, and when facing the inordinate amount of stretch-only submarine motion hurlers in the game. And there are quite a few starting pitchers that always work out of the stretch in MLB Power Pros 2008 even though they don’t in real life (Phil Hughes comes to mind as one).
The developers added an interesting feature in Exhibition mode that allows you to optionally manage your bullpen during a game. In other words, you have to plan your pitching changes and have a reliever warmed up before bringing him into the game. Adds a touch of realism and another element of strategy, though I love the fact I can play a game of Power Pros in 20 minutes instead of an hour in a typical baseball sim. But in what can only be described as a puzzling at best decision, they opted not to make that feature available in Season mode. Not really sure why.
Three other nitpicks – in this day and age it is not too much to ask sports game developers to provide a means of doing online roster updates. That still is not available in MLB Power Pros 2008. Additionally, Season mode still only lasts 10 years. That is too short, we really need 20 years like MLB Life mode. The reasons are two-fold – with only 10 years, the annual draft in June is pretty much a waste after the first few years because it takes so long to practice up prospects to serviceable MLB levels. The second is that you don’t really have to worry about the draft anyway because 10 years isn’t long enough to cycle off most current players into retirement. So there is really no incentive to give much attention to drafting players. The last nitpick is that big name players move teams way too easily and frequently. Play a few seasons and the rosters will look nothing like they did at the start. Sure roster turnover is a part of baseball, but you rarely if ever see a team not from Florida in real life completely turnover a 25 man roster in 3 years. But it is exceedingly common in MLB Power Pros 2008, just like last year.
The complaints aside, the statistical depth of Season mode is just as amazing this year as last, and the gameplay is top notch. It is still immensely enjoyable playing through.
League Mode
I’ll admit, I spent about 15 minutes with league mode in 2007 before never going back to it, and this year I didn’t get beyond reading about it in the manual. Why’s that? Well, league mode is where you can add up to 6 teams and play against each other in a custom schedule. Sounds like a perfect mode for … what’s that pesky phrase I’m looking for …. oh yeah, ONLINE PLAY! But nope, no online available, and that severely diminishes the usefulness/purpose of League mode. You might as well just play Season mode.
Wiimote-mode
Having the Wii version, some home run derby is good family fun. My 6-year old daughter likes to edit players in the MyData menu to look girlish (the long pink/red hair, red glasses, pink earrings and wristbands, etc.), max their hitting abilities, and then go into the Wiimote mode and jack homers. The Wiimote modes are the same as last year, you can play exhibition games (optionally using Mii’s) or home run derby (not terribly different than Wii Sports from a pure physical standpoint, just lots more players/stadiums and statistical data tracking). The developers again failed to listen to the pleas of Wii owners to enable the use of the Wiimote in Season mode. While I would never play that way myself, I see the point of people who argue for that. The fact that the Wiimote alone can be used in exhibition games means it really isn’t a technical reason why it isn’t available in Season mode. It just comes across as being developer laziness not to go ahead and integrate the Wiimote-only controls with the rest of the modes.
Conclusion
Despite the flaws, MLB Power Pros 2008 is an incredibly addicting game with almost limitless replay value when you factor in the different modes. If you own the 2007 game, whether it is worth buying 2008 depends a lot on your personal interests. If you don’t care about Success mode and primarily play modes that haven’t changed much (or at all) from last year, the answer might be no. But if you are into Success mode, the new one is worth the price of admission all by itself. I went back and forth in the 2007 game between playing Season and Success modes, and I can already tell with 2008 that the new MLB Life mode is going to replace a lot of my Season mode time. It’s really that good even with the annoyances I pointed out.
Overall, on its own merits and not in relation to 2007, I’d give MLB Power Pros 2008 a score of 9 (on a 10 point scale). It does so much right that you get to where you just accept the warts. Grading it in comparison to 2007 I’d drop the grade to a 7.5, just because I feel like the developers didn’t do enough to address the common complaints about the 2007 game and a significant amount of the game is the same (or has only minor changes) as last year. Still a better than solid value though, and all in all MLB Power Pros 2008 is a highly recommended title to pick up.
