Major League Baseball 2k6

It's spring. The boys of summer have taken the field. Now that 2k Sports has the MLB license, we're reliant on them to bring the sport to our TVs. Do they succeed? Like an ugly 1-0 scraper, sort of.

MLB2k6 does sport an impressive feature list. It includes the World Baseball Classic rosters, official Inside Edge scouting reports on all of the players, a touched-up franchise mode, and VIP (Virtual Identity Profile) play style tracking that allows to you play against yourself, or anyone else who has made a VIP file through play. With all that going for it, how could they go wrong?

The biggest offender, to me, are the graphics and presentation. It may just be me but allot of the text in the menus come off extremely blurry on a standard TV. Sometimes it's to the extent that it becomes hard to read what's written. That's a minor problem, however, compared to the failure of the in-game graphics. 2k Sports can't seem to get it together with their baseball art team. Like every game in this series going back to World Series Baseball 2k2 (yes, it does trace it's lineage back to that series on the Dreamcast), the game is a blurry mess. The textures are muddy, and the look overall is that of an unfinished product. EA's MVP Baseball series was always sharp and crisp, so what happened here? Also, they players continue to look almost nothing like who they're supposed to be. If the game didn't tell you who was who (and the names on the jerseys were gone), you'd have no clue you were playing with real MLB players.

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