It's not nearly as good as the mvp series was, but mlb 2k6 still manages to deliver a game that's worth playing
User Rating: 7.3 | Major League Baseball 2K6 GC
Despite the rather long and annoying delay mlb 2k6 hit stores at a 10 dollar discount, which is the only thing that makes the transition from mvp to 2k6 easy to swallow. The actual gameplay is enjoyable to an extent, but the game offers little to no instruction as to how to do anything in my opinion. Pitching was the worst for me, it turns out you have to press the button twice, which i had no idea in the beginning which resulted in a frustratingly high amount of passed balls, i actually had to look up online how to pitch. However, once mastered, the pitching, along with the inside edge is pretty good and the camera angle when facing the computer is nice. The hitting control default is the swing-stick, which allows you to either have a contact swing by pulling back and simply releasing with the c-stick, or taking a power swing by pushing it forward. I found it rather unintuitive and difficult to master. After my first game where the computer struck me out 11 times (on legend) and shutting me out, i decided to switch to classic mode which i found much more enjoyable than the swing stick. The inside ege, though pricey, makes pitching and hitting much cooler and more fun against the computer, though the hitting inside ede isn't quite as reliable as the pitching. Suffice it to say don't let the inside edge let you cheat with your control stick. The stadiums all look great and the player models are pretty nice, so the graphics are fairly solid, however the pitcher seems to be way too faraway when hitting, and vice-versa. That's kind of annoying, but besides that the graphics are solid enough to the point that it doesn't drag down the gameplay. The fielding however, does drag it down a little. The pure motion physics are good and i've witnessed some very lifelike and cool plays, however the players are kind of lunky and it takes a long time to make a change in direction which is frustrating. Also the fielders can take an aggravatingly long time to get rid of the ball which was annoying. Baserunning is by far the worst part of the game. You have to repeatedly press a button to get players to run full speed which is fun trying to beat out a slow grounder for a single, but in theory they should always be running at full speed. It's difficult to sprint w/ more than one player at a time since they all have different buttons so that's stupid. Also it was confusing at first to tell where the runner was in relation to all the bases, cause the system they have set up is hard to notice, also it's also really hard to tell how far you're telling the baserunner to run, like i've unwillingly gone for an inside the park-homerun when all i meant was a tripple, cause i pressed L to many times, so watch out for that. Jon Miller and Joe Morgan are very good as the announcers and gives the game an eerily realistic feature that i thought was quite impressive. The game offers a couple good other features, most noticeable the franchise mode, which i thought was pretty good, it's not quite MVP 05 standard, but it does the job. I thought all the other modes, which i'm not going to name cause i'm lazy were good, however in the homerun derby mode, you have to watch the computer go, which is time-consuming and boring. Also you have a stamina bar which is just annoying cause it takes away from the amount of homeruns you can hit, and it doesn't affect all players equally. That stamina bar is my biggest complaint towards the game. All in all if gamecube is the only platform you own, like it is for me, unless you want to take the time to update the rosters for MVP 2005, which i didn't, and you want an updated realistic baseball game, by all means get it, but don't expect anything great from it.
