Major League Baseball 2K10 for Nintendo DS Reviews by Gamers

People expect certain things when they spend money on baseball games. They expect to be able to hit, they expect to be able to pitch, they want to run the bases and they want to field the ball. The DS version of MLB 2K10 comes through on only half of these most basic of expectations. It doesn't help that the two core facets of baseball that the game does present are done quite poorly. When you toss in the fact that there really isn't a single enjoyable mode in the $20 cart, MLB 2K10 on DS quickly becomes one of the least enjoyable sports games I've seen in a long, long while.



So how does the DS version manage to screw up even the simplest of baseball details? For starters, it has only two real camera angles. There's one for pitching and one used for batting. As soon as contact is made with the ball the bottom screen on the DS reverts to a two-dimensional dot display that shows players' numbers as they run around the field trying to track down the ball. When playing defense you can elect to control these nomadic dots by pressing the left trigger, but you can't tell the game to automatically give you control so you'll have to hit the left trigger every time the bat makes contact with the ball. To make matters worse, it doesn't always work. Sometimes it will appear that a ball's going to stay in the infield, but instead it flies to the outfield. So rather than becoming the second baseman, you switch to an outfielder (more accurately, you switch to a dot with a number on it) and need to make a play quickly. Of course, that kind of misconception wouldn't happen if the display was capable of doing anything more than a 2D drawing of dots moving along a baseball field. The top display stays static throughout, displaying basic statistics about the palyer at-bat and the pitcher.



Mini-games pop-up on close plays such as throws to home plate or a tag at first base. Some of these mini-games call for you to hit A at a certain split-second, another forces you to hit a series of buttons as quickly as possible. It's so much of a shock to see a screen other than the hitting, batting or field of dots, I completely failed on my first few mini-game attempts. I suppose it's somewhat comforting to know that the developers figured out that people needed something to spice things up a bit, but the mini-games don't come close to fitting the bill.



Perhaps it would have had MLB 2K10 been given an interesting mode of any sort. The closest it comes is with its Season and Postseason modes. Season mode doesn't allow you to simulate games so you might as well forget about ever trudging through all 162 games in an MLB season, especially when you realize that the game doesn't have trading functionality. But hey, at least you can check your batters' stats against right and left-handed pitchers from both the AL and NL. That has to count for something. Or not.



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