Powerfully Deceptive
MLB Power Pros mixes old-school baseball with training and light dating elements to become something for, well, everyone.
Published: November 4, 2007
Funny thing, that Major League Baseball license exclusive 2K Sports has. Ordinarily, it would have completely removed the ability for anyone to make a MLB game, but Konami, the quick little cats that they are, actually came up with a solution: take the ultra-cute, superdeformed characters from their Power Pros game, inject the MLB license and have 2K Sports publish the thing, sharing in the profits along the way.
The result is a game that has at least the names of the characters and some very nicely modeled official stadiums, but skirts around being any real competition for the baseball sims out there. It also means for guys like me that absolutely abhor baseball in just about any form, the normally high barrier of entry is removed, and in it's place a simple two-button control scheme that makes playing baseball about as simple as the 8-bit days of gaming.
That's a good thing, because the baseball games are not only easy to grasp right from the start, but they're given enough modern-day depth in predicting pitches and some light risk vs. reward scenarios where you can sacrifice contact area while batting for more power that it feels simple, yet complex at the same time. The pitching controls use only the analog stick and the X button, but here too you're allowed to aim the pitch around the strike zone and play around with sliders and curve balls in a way that just knowing where the pitch was originally aimed isn't going to be enough the guarantee a hit. It'll take timing and some predictive prowess as well.
All this means is that the core baseball stuff is there, even if it's not filled with motion captured animations and scanned-in player faces. Instead, the high-tech is eschewed in favor of a baseball game that just plain fun to play, and there's plenty of stuff to do in addition to the usual season, playoff and exhibition games. The former is actually quite deep, allowing you to do the usual stuff like manage trades and oversee general operations, but there's plenty of opportunity to flex a little training muscle for the team too. One-offs like a home run derby help with batting practice, but if you really want to get into the meat of the game, it's all about Success Mode.
By far the most sim-like of the modes in the game, fittingly is something of a cobbled-together dating/work/life simulation in addition to the usual baseball stuff and training regimens. As a college kid who joins a down-and-out team with a has-been coach, the goal is to balance personal life and responsibilities like work and school with becoming a star on the field and with the ladies. Like all good Japanese sims, the elements often bunch up on you at the same time, forcing you to make the choice between dating someone and training for the next big game (early on, you hardly even play, making boosting your stats by way of carefully chosen training routines that much more important), or doing homework vs. going to work.
It ends up being an incredibly rewarding balancing act when it all works out, and though there is ample room to completely bail on one aspect and effectively end the game, most of the time is just lighthearted enough that you can wing it. Two things keep the mode interesting throughout the long road to the Majors: Fate Cards, which randomly pop up and determine your responses to major forks in your Success path, and some extremely well done localization. Since the game does everything with text-based conversations, the game is rife with little jokes and even a bit of self-referential humor at times. It really is the anti-sim sim -- at least as far as American sports games are concerned -- and again, it's disarmingly easy to get into, yet provides a ton of depth.
Plenty of the game's charm is owed to the limbless characters and their animations, which go much, much farther than you'd think toward representing the real-life characters than a bunch of stocky little cartoon dude with ovals for arms and legs ought to. Not only are the batting, fielding and pitching animations really quite detailed, the stadiums are clearly modeled with an attention to the real-life locales. It's something that could have been jarring, closely modeled venues and cartoony little characters, but somehow Konami managed to pull it off.
The audio, on the other hand, is a little less solid. Excessive repetition (even for a sports game) kills a lot of the announcer's overzealous commentary, and there are times when he'll actually say the complete opposite of what just happened. Left to support the rest of the audio, the sound effects do a great job, but then this is a baseball game, and limited ambience keeps things from sounding completely authentic. Cartoony and fun, sure, but no replacement for getting trashed at the actual ballpark.
MLB Power Pros' greatest asset is the presentation. No nonsense and adorably charming, the game suckers you in with what seems to be a simple little game of Baseball Lite, but the deeper you plug into it, the more you realize just how much time and effort was put into making the game appear simple. Even with all that depth, however, the game remains stupidly accessible, enough so that I feel even people who hate baseball games should probably give it a rental, and if you're truly hardcore... well, you just might end up falling in love too.
The result is a game that has at least the names of the characters and some very nicely modeled official stadiums, but skirts around being any real competition for the baseball sims out there. It also means for guys like me that absolutely abhor baseball in just about any form, the normally high barrier of entry is removed, and in it's place a simple two-button control scheme that makes playing baseball about as simple as the 8-bit days of gaming.
That's a good thing, because the baseball games are not only easy to grasp right from the start, but they're given enough modern-day depth in predicting pitches and some light risk vs. reward scenarios where you can sacrifice contact area while batting for more power that it feels simple, yet complex at the same time. The pitching controls use only the analog stick and the X button, but here too you're allowed to aim the pitch around the strike zone and play around with sliders and curve balls in a way that just knowing where the pitch was originally aimed isn't going to be enough the guarantee a hit. It'll take timing and some predictive prowess as well.
All this means is that the core baseball stuff is there, even if it's not filled with motion captured animations and scanned-in player faces. Instead, the high-tech is eschewed in favor of a baseball game that just plain fun to play, and there's plenty of stuff to do in addition to the usual season, playoff and exhibition games. The former is actually quite deep, allowing you to do the usual stuff like manage trades and oversee general operations, but there's plenty of opportunity to flex a little training muscle for the team too. One-offs like a home run derby help with batting practice, but if you really want to get into the meat of the game, it's all about Success Mode.
By far the most sim-like of the modes in the game, fittingly is something of a cobbled-together dating/work/life simulation in addition to the usual baseball stuff and training regimens. As a college kid who joins a down-and-out team with a has-been coach, the goal is to balance personal life and responsibilities like work and school with becoming a star on the field and with the ladies. Like all good Japanese sims, the elements often bunch up on you at the same time, forcing you to make the choice between dating someone and training for the next big game (early on, you hardly even play, making boosting your stats by way of carefully chosen training routines that much more important), or doing homework vs. going to work.
It ends up being an incredibly rewarding balancing act when it all works out, and though there is ample room to completely bail on one aspect and effectively end the game, most of the time is just lighthearted enough that you can wing it. Two things keep the mode interesting throughout the long road to the Majors: Fate Cards, which randomly pop up and determine your responses to major forks in your Success path, and some extremely well done localization. Since the game does everything with text-based conversations, the game is rife with little jokes and even a bit of self-referential humor at times. It really is the anti-sim sim -- at least as far as American sports games are concerned -- and again, it's disarmingly easy to get into, yet provides a ton of depth.
Plenty of the game's charm is owed to the limbless characters and their animations, which go much, much farther than you'd think toward representing the real-life characters than a bunch of stocky little cartoon dude with ovals for arms and legs ought to. Not only are the batting, fielding and pitching animations really quite detailed, the stadiums are clearly modeled with an attention to the real-life locales. It's something that could have been jarring, closely modeled venues and cartoony little characters, but somehow Konami managed to pull it off.
The audio, on the other hand, is a little less solid. Excessive repetition (even for a sports game) kills a lot of the announcer's overzealous commentary, and there are times when he'll actually say the complete opposite of what just happened. Left to support the rest of the audio, the sound effects do a great job, but then this is a baseball game, and limited ambience keeps things from sounding completely authentic. Cartoony and fun, sure, but no replacement for getting trashed at the actual ballpark.
MLB Power Pros' greatest asset is the presentation. No nonsense and adorably charming, the game suckers you in with what seems to be a simple little game of Baseball Lite, but the deeper you plug into it, the more you realize just how much time and effort was put into making the game appear simple. Even with all that depth, however, the game remains stupidly accessible, enough so that I feel even people who hate baseball games should probably give it a rental, and if you're truly hardcore... well, you just might end up falling in love too.
