PlayStation 3
Released in 2009 by Sony Computer Entertainment
Grade: A
This is an outstanding baseball simulation that looks great, plays smooth, and has enough depth to make a baseball dork obsessed.
Where it falls in the series
It’s the third Show on PS3. As far as I can tell, once they got to this point, every Show game is fantastic, there are only minor cosmetic upgrades and small additions to the gameplay and features each year. For some reason, 09 was a favorite among online dorks years after it came out, but I don’t know why it might be better than 10 or 11 or 12 or 13. I imagine there are slight changes to the pitching and hitting logic, but discovering them would take more time than I’m giving to this series.
Praises and gripes
This game feels like baseball, it moves at a good pace, it has just the right controls, and it’s challenging for the right reasons. The pitching and hitting systems are well engineered. When you hit, you choose contact swing or power swing and aim for the ball, and it’s intuitive to watch the pitch from the catcher’s eye view. When you pitch, you’ve got the classic three-press pitching meter, which determines accuracy and power. Everything is quick and responsive.
The game is realistic in that real pitching strategies are justly rewarded. Savvy baseball fans who understand why you should throw a certain pitch in a certain situation will have a distinct advantage over the casual fan. The tough thing about the Show is that you’ve got to learn this stuff the hard way. If you force a harmless ground-out, the game doesn’t tell you why. It doesn’t say, “Nice job, you threw high and mixed speeds to get the hitter off balance, and when you threw a fastball low, he didn’t see the pitch well and desperately poked at it for a lousy grounder.” Also, each pitch has its own confidence meter, so your fastball might be on point, but you can’t get a handle on your curve. It adds dynamics and makes each outing different.
In addition to basic difficulty settings, there are sliders to adjust the difficulty of individual aspects of the game. There’s a ton of options in general. You can view the strike zone marker, have the catcher suggest pitches, speed up the pace of play, turn the “guess pitch” system on or off, all kinds of stuff. It’s all situated nicely in the menus, and it’s also easy to check out diagrams of pitches from earlier at-bats, see where a hitter’s hot and cold zones are, see the speed and running ability of guys on-base, almost anything that helps inform your strategy during the game.
The action in the field feels great. It’s smooth and lifelike and just feels like baseball. Baserunning can be a problem in some baseball games, but there’s a nice, easy system here. Fielding is simple, just run after balls and press a button to throw. You can switch to auto-fielding or “assisted,” where your player automatically runs and all you do is throw.
If you want nitpicks, it would be great if every pitcher had a unique delivery, because the lower-tier guys who use the generic delivery are much easier to face, since you’ve seen the same delivery so many times. Likewise, it would be great if hitters all had unique stances and swings, but that’s just cosmetic.
The game looked amazing in its time, but I can admit it looks a bit dated now. I tend to hold baseball graphics to higher standards than other sports games, because you’re going to spend a lot of time looking at the same thing. If the grass looks like plastic, but I can play The Show 13 and it looks like grass, I might figure I want to play The Show 13, you know? The players look mostly the same in this version, and the daytime/nighttime transition isn’t as spiffy as it became later in the series.
The sound is fantastic. The three-man commentary is impressive, but if you play for a long time, you’ll probably turn it off and enjoy the sounds of the ballpark.
Franchise mode is as deep as you want it to be. You can go all out, managing trades and free agency and playing minor league games, but just doing the basic stuff like making the lineup and calling a guy up when someone’s injured, that’s pretty rewarding too.
This is a great game. Once they put together a game that looks great, is easy to play, and has such deep pitching/hitting logic, they really didn’t need to change much.