Portable baseball has never been better.
Let's start at the beginning (A very good place to start!). The start menu loads fairly quickly, without a lot of useless animations or sounds to slow down your gaming experience. The soundtrack is pretty good; I've been playing it for quite some time and haven't gotten tired of any of the songs yet. The main menu is easy to navigate, and all other menus in the game are fairly run-of-the-mill.
MLB '06 The Show has three modes. You can choose Quick Play, suit up two teams and hit the diamond. You can choose Career Mode. In this mode, you create a young big-league hopeful and guide his career from his first spring training to the end. This mode can be highly addictive, as pretty much every feature imaginable on your player is up for customization. Then there's the ever-popular Season Mode, where you take one Major League team from Spring Training to the World Series.
After you choose your team and make some last-second adjustments to your roster (another nice feature), it's time to sit through the somewhat lengthy load screen, and then, PLAY BALL! And once you start, you might not stop. The first thing you'll notice about the play is the stunningly good commentary from Matt Vasgersian, Dave Campbell and Rex Hudler. This might be the single best feature about MLB '06 The Show. I'm still discovering new sayings and unique sound clips for the myriad of situations that arise before and during a ball game. The commentary is extremely intelligent; if you leave a curve ball up in the strike zone, but the batter takes, Dave will say "He got away with one there". The commentary is so good, there are times I'm tempted to just watch the computer battle it out and listen to the announcers.
When you throw out the first pitch, you'll probably be taken aback at first at how much goes in to every pitch. You have to select pitch type, set location, start the pitch meter, and stop the meter for power and for accuracy. While this might seem like much, all these features are very much what a big league pitcher would have to go through. But watch out, because if you don't mix up your pitches, batters will lock on to you easier, and your fifth fastball in a row might find McCovey Cove.
Batting is also a new experience with the Total Control feature. You get a chance to "sit on", or predict, a pitch. If you guess fastball away, and that's what's coming, a crosshair locks on to the site and you get a power boost. Again, very realistic.
So are there any cons? Well, besides no Cracker Jacks, the negatives are pretty minor. For starters, the 2-D crowd looks silly on stadium shots. Then again, very few baseball sims have ever made a 3-D audience. Load screens can take a while. The only gameplay flaw I see is that basestealing can be very touch-and-go; the runner does not take off just as soon as you send him. Also, any players you create won't get the benefit of being named in the commentary. You would think by now that the CPU could just take two names it already has memorized and piece them together.
Minor flaws aside, you really can't go wrong with MLB '06 The Show. The gameplay doesn't get old, the commentary is unbelievable, and the modes will keep you entertained for hours. A top baseball sim.