DirtDog13

Marginal improvement at best from SMB3 to SMB4. Overall, a disappointing release from Metalhead. THE GOOD The new player models are a welcome addition. Players did lose a bit of uniqueness, especially the “buff” players, however moving to a more realistic style body is a net positive for the game overall. The addition of Legends brings faces from all eras of baseball from Babe Ruth and David Ortiz to Mark Loretta and Jeff Fassero. It is incredibly entertaining to throw these former pros in amongst the clever names we are used to from SMB. Seeing Johnny Damon alongside a dude named Slapper Glutes is precisely what these games were made for. Hecklers make a comeback and come locked and loaded to harass every player on the field. No player is exempt from being on the receiving end and it continues the light feel the series is known for. Franchise mode has received some love in the addition of team chemistry, managerial moments, and player loyalty. However, these additions are marred by bugs and errors (more below). —————————- THE BAD In-Game audio is bad. While the game’s light-hearted feel has been a strong point, the hard turn into an almost whimsical nature with the in-game audio was a step back. Nearly every play has some sort of extra audio tied into it, from throws, pitches, and every time contact is made. The umpires are fun for a game or two before becoming a hinderance. Maybe the umpires wouldn’t be so annoying if the strike zone wasn’t as poor as it is. A constant issue for the series, the strike zone still struggles with high pitches. However, SMB4 has an additional issue. During online play (it seems to be most common there) pitches at the batter’s head level or pitches so far inside it activates the dodge animation for the batter are being called strikes. Franchise mode still struggles to get basic statistics correct. Players who enter a game but do not record a plate appearance are not credited with playing a game. There are still no box scores for previously completed games. Earned/Unearned runs are not tabulated correctly RBIs also struggle with being accurately assessed. The new additions to franchise are hampered by Metalhead’s inability to get the bare basics correct. Managerial moments are far too frequent and have a negative impact overall on the mode, specifically with loyalty. Reworked, they could be a positive, but as it stands they’re nothing more than failed attempt to add depth. For instance, after subbing in Mark Loretta during a blowout as a defensive sub late (and that appearance not counting since he did not record an AB) I was met with a managerial moment after the game to console one of two players who felt sad they didn’t play (both did play as subs), I was forced to watch Mark’s “loyalty” drop by 25 points because 1) I had to choose one of two players and 2) Metalhead’s inability to properly keep stats meant Loretta and another player were the ones to suffer. Players still cannot sim multiple games at once. ————————- THE UGLY Customization, once THE biggest highlight to the game is unchanged from SMB3. No additional logos, jerseys, or fonts. The UI has taken 10 steps back. What used to be a simple two or three button presses/menus to create a team has somehow devolved into a messy process where in order to create a single team, you must create an entire league. The UI is bloated and messy, even in-game. The price point. The jump in price makes everything negative about SMB4 even worse. At a lower price point, it’s worth dealing with some of the issues plaguing the game and series, however, as EA and Metalhead have decided to raise the price, the expectations are higher. Simply, the game isn’t worth $50.

Swing and a miss from SDS. Another step backwards as the engine continues to show its age. The presentation changes are poor, especially the flyovers which look like they belong two console generations ago. There are no significant gameplay changes. Franchise mode continues to get more and more outdated. The overhaul to scouting was a decent upgrade, but the lack of any meaningful changes around it continues to allow Franchise mode to languish. Once the top franchise mode in sports gaming, SDS's Franchise is worse than EA's NHL. The majority of the positives come from the addition of the Negro Leagues stories. Other than that, there's not much positive to write about. In no way is MLB The Show 23 worth $70.

This is, by no stretch of the imagination, one of the worst games I’ve ever played. From graphics to game play, there isn’t a single positive about 7 Days to Die. It’s a game that should have been relegated to the waste bin. Let’s start with graphics. For using the Unity engine, the graphics are some of the worst I’ve seen. The draw distance is completely unacceptable for the generation of console. Gameplay: movement is bad. Slow and lethargic, it’s a chore just to move around. Combat is horrendous. Actions are stiff and boring. It doesn’t help that with how poor the draw distance is, there’s no real use for the stealth mechanic as you’re not going to see the zombies until it’s too late. The menus system is clunky. Trying to get the list of recipes to scroll was problematic at best. The positive: the crafting, amount of crafting recipes, and the ability to queue craft is a good idea - it’s just with how poor the rest of the game is, it’s completely overshadowed. This game needed another year or two of development - if not that it should’ve been discarded and never released. Don’t waste your time or money on this. It may be on a game pass, but it’s still not worth it.

MLB The Show 21 continues a downward trend for the series. The Xbox One debut for the series is marred by framerate issues, server disconnects, and uninspired offline modes. Let's start with the good. The game looks good, player models are the best they've been and stadiums and lighting are great. The animations look and feel authentic with plenty of variety. The new pinpoint pitching system is brilliant and pitching has never felt better. When fielding works, it's fluid and authentic. It's great to have baseball back on the Xbox. The positives are overshadowed by the series' long plagued issues. MLB stadiums suffer from frame rate issues, causing hitting and pitching to become much more difficult. Check swings are currently broken. Telling base runners to stop and go back still takes too much time, while CPU fielders are able to make split-second decisions in throwing, causing altogether too many runners thrown out on the base path. Occasionally, fielders will refuse to field a ground ball. The decision to tie RTTS and Diamond Dynasty together is a poor one and further minimizes, the already diminished, offline portion ****. The continued push towards DD is nothing short of what EA has done with their sports titles, it is disappointing to see SDS move in the same direction. Franchise Mode is stale and has been stagnant for a years. It needed something to revitalize it, but SDS failed to make any meaningful change. The Depth Chart is a needed change, but it does nothing to deepen the mode or remedy issues that have plagued the series. Issues like: progression of young players and the regression of older players, players not retiring despite being 37+ years old and ratings below 60. The total roster size has been expanded to 93, which is positive, but again it fails to deepen the mode. It's a bare-bones franchise mode, which desperately needed an infusion of life. Player customization is as varied as it ever has been. SDS has a large selection of gloves, bats, batting gloves, and (finally) catcher's equipment. The catchers have a much larger selection of gear, including Nike, to choose from. The game has plenty of potential. Its current state, however, is disappointing giving where the series has been. SDS is, unfortunately, falling down the same path EA took. They continue to prioritize modes with microtransactions, ignoring their offline modes to further. drive MTX revenue. With server disconnects, broken rewards pathways, disappearing stubs and cards, it is yet another disappointing launch. More is expected of SDS, especially when The Show is their primary focus. In its current state, the game is a disappointment at best.

EA might as well scrap this series based on the amount of effort they put into it, which is zero. Persistent problems from 10 years ago are still present. The AI is still utterly atrocious at everything, the player models look fine from afar but any sort of close up shows how outdated the models are. Passing and skating are still broken and frustrating. The commentary is outdated, stale, and not very good in general. EA has done nothing to innovate this series since 2012 when Sean Ramjagsingh took over. They have constantly removed features and modes, only to bring them back as "new." It is evident the only mode EA cares about is HUT. Every other mode lags dangerously behind in innovation, modernization, and features. Franchise mode is dull. The addition of budgets a year or two back is only there to slow players down, rather than create a meaningful feature. The player morale feature is improved, but still inefficient. Star players don't feel like star players. Everyone plays and feels the same. They also look the same 70% of the time. While stars have their actual faces, it seems EA gave everyone else one of four different generic ones. For a game that so often points out when the players have done something wrong and tries to show players how to be better, EA doesn't take its own advice. The skating and puck mechanics are some of the worst I've ever seen in gaming. Players routinely get "stuck in the mud" while skating, blown past on defense as they attempt a 3-point turn to engage the puck carrier, or randomly lose the puck because reasons. Goaltending is still a coin flip. On higher difficulties, the CPU goalie will stop everything in a three-block radius. On lower difficulties, however, the CPU goalie is useless. Shots with no business going in routinely find their way home. The higher difficulties swing the advantage to the CPU in artificial difficulty. They play more aggressively while your players sulk, miss shots, and your goalie becomes swiss cheese. Players still bounce off one another while checking at times. As in, the players don't even recognize the check but just skate into one another. It's problems like this that show how little EA cares. There isn't a sports series out there that is trying as hard to disappoint their player base as EA is with its NHL series. It's time for a change in leadership. EA needs to step back and seriously revisit its commitment to the series. NHL 17 is wholly unacceptable as a modern AAA sports title.

A once proud series strikes out with a runner on third. Being the only actual MLB game (No, RBI Baseball doesn't count) it should be fairly easy for San Diego Studios (SDS) to put out the best baseball game each year. For the first time in the series, it feels like SDS phoned it in. The game looks and feels really well done. The player models and uniforms are exceptional and the slight improvements to graphics prove you don't need an overhaul to make a noticeable difference in how the game looks and feels. All the right modes make their way back, except season mode. Season mode was a nice touch, but SDS decided to pull it along with the online Franchise. While alone this wouldn't be enough to worry, but along with the other issues in The Show 18, it only seems like laziness. Here's the real issues: The "improvements" made to any mode other than Diamond Dynasty are broken, inefficient, or don't make a difference. RTTS, the series' flagship mode, is repetitive. Progression is broken and flawed. Rather than allow players to make their player a 99 overall in every attribute, SDS has introduced player archetypes with attribute caps that vary amongst the archetypes. For instance, a "Plain Filthy" pitcher can put some serious movement on their pitches that, one would think, would lead to more strikeouts, yet because of the archetype's low K/9 cap (the ability to generate swings and misses) it doesn't matter. As an example of a "Plain Filthy" pitcher, Greg Maddux is used. While Maddux wasn't a 200K/Year guy, he still amassed 3,371 strikeouts in his career. The game's limits on its player archetypes significantly hampers players. Franchise mode is nearly broken. The "phases" improvement is useless. Rather than going to the calendar and simming to the draft, you click a button and sim to the draft. It doesn't make things quicker. In fact, it makes it longer to do the same task in previous games. This is because a bug which was eliminated years ago makes its return. The CPU will always attempt to "fix" your roster, even if roster management is set to manual. That's right, we are back to the bug from the early mid 2000's. The CPU will sign, re-sign, call-up and demote players as it sees fit. This means, during free agency, players are forced to move a day at a time to make sure the CPU doesn't sign players. If the CPU does manage to sneak a signing, players are forced to choose between keeping a (more than likely) below average player or cutting the player and keeping the dead weight in salary. If the CPU signs too many players, it can put the player in an impossible spot budget wise. This alone nearly breaks franchise mode. Roster management is supposed to be the highlight of the mode, but SDS utterly fails. Again, it seems like laziness that led to this point. And, for the umpteenth time in a row, there is no jersey number selection screen. Now, this isn't a major issue, but when taken in context of the rest of the issues in '18, it is more than annoying. It's nothing more than laziness on SDS's part. Now let's talk in-game issues. When playing a game in "Hybrid" mode, cut scenes that show real-life clips of a city cause the game to loop and forces the player to close the application. It took less than 10 games for this to happen multiple times, showing SDS didn't even attempt to test their game. At times, fielders refuse to bend over to field ground balls right next to them. Again, this is an issue from years ago that was removed but has once more made its way into the franchise. If this installment is any indication of how SDS plans to treat the series moving forward, there needs to be a real discussion of what's next in sports gaming. There is little attention to detail as numerous bugs and mistakes make their way back into the franchise. The Show 18 is a lazy, half-done game and clearly shows SDS is moving towards the Madden/FIFA/NHL strategy of only putting effort into its pay to win mode. If this is going to be SDS's effort moving forward, a change in leadership is needed.

If I were going to take one sports title from 2017 and Q1 of 2018 and use it as a benchmark for others to reach, it would be Super Mega Baseball 2. Metalhead doesn't just hit a homerun with SMB2, they've hit a walk-off grand slam. The game is visually beautiful. The color palette pops, the character models are less exaggerated and more realistic, and the stadiums have a more modern look and feel. The Ego system makes a return after being possibly the best difficulty system in a sports game in the release of Super Mega Baseball. It allows players to scale the difficulty from 1-99, but players can change the difficulty in any aspect of the game. Are you a really good pitcher, but you can't hit? Put the pitching ego at 55, keep the hitting lower at 35. It allows for a unique experience for every player and allows players to challenge themselves without feeling like they're getting beaten down by the CPU. Let's get to where SMB2 really shines: Customization. In SMB the customization was there, but it wasn't fully fleshed out. Metalhead doubled down on customization and it paid off. Nearly everything can be customized. Players, teams, uniforms, bats, gloves, windups, batting stances, and even player "attitude" can be customized so no team will be the same. Not only can you customize players and teams, but you can customize leagues. Want to have a small league and only play 16 games a season? Done. Want to have a 30-team, 162-game season? Done. SMB2 will generate any missing teams, league names, divisions, and conferences to fill the league. Of course there are a few minor flaws. Fielders struggle at times to pick up baseballs that are relatively close, starting pitchers often go way too deep into games, and all the customization can't be shared with the rest of the SMB2 player base. However, it is the commitment to the fundamentals that makes SMB2 such a good game. It gets the fundamentals of the sport right. The controls are basic and easy to learn, the ego system allows for a unique experience for each user and allows them to control the challenge they face. The customization adds an entirely new layer to the game that will keep players hooked . SMB2 is not just another "arcade baseball game." It very well may be the best sports game of the year. Metalhead absolutely crushed it.

On its face, Sea of Thieves sounds like a lot of fun. Travel the high seas with some friends, engage in naval combat, and plunder to your heart's content. There are moments when this vision acts itself out in fantastic ways, but that's all it is. Just moments. Rare has created a relatively beautiful world that is devoid of life. The game hinges on player's imagination and creating their own path, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. There have been many games that rely on the player's ability to create their own story. Yet, with Sea of Thieves, everything feels empty. The only NPCs are quest givers, who are one-dimensional, and poorly crafted skeleton enemies. The enemies lack any creativity or thought. They are merely a stand-in obstacle for players to pass through. The enemies themselves don't amount to a challenge, until Sea of Thieves' clunky, outdated, and overall poor land combat kicks in. The land combat is not only dull and clunky, but downright bad. It feels more akin to a chore rather than a rewarding challenge as you try to secure your treasure. For a game touted as an open sandbox, it seems Rare built the sandbox but forgot the sand. There are three factions with three "different" quest types, but each amounts to fetching a chest, skull, or animals and returning them to the quest giver. There are skeleton forts to clear, but when melee combat feels like players are using low-level characters from Morrowind, the excitement from facing down a horde of enemies is completely destroyed. This leaves just fetch quests. The quests are nothing more than radiant questlines that have popped up in AAA RPGs: Go to x, find Y, return. Of course, as a game centering on pirating, there are treasure maps and riddles to solve, but the enjoyment is once again diluted thanks to the previously mentioned skeletons. Once again, fighting enemies should feeling challenging and rewarding, rather than an annoyance. It seems Rare threw the skeletons in because they knew not having mobs was creating too easy of an experience, so they hastily threw something together and here we are. In a game where cosmetic customization was touted over a more traditional progression system, cosmetic customization is severely lacking. I was extremely excited when I learned SoT would enter around cosmetics, rather than unlocking higher grade hulls or weapons. It should have been a fresh breath of air. Instead, the customization is barebones and lacking. Currently, there are only three items on ships that players can customize. Players cannot create anything truly unique. In a sandbox game. A sandbox game that touted cosmetic customization as the driving force behind its rewards. Player customization is also severely lacking. Players are limited to just a few clothing and hair options. Sea of Thieves is everything the gaming community has hated about recent release in one concise package. Lack of customization, bad AI, an empty world, bad combat, and fetch quests. The promise of "more content to come" cannot be the excuse developers turn to when they push out games that are half-finished, but that is precisely what Rare has done. It is not a promise of "Free DLC," but rather a promise of content that should have been in the game from its awkward and mostly broken launch. Let's get to the exciting parts, where Sea of Thieves really shows its value. NAVAL COMBAT. For a game built around PvP, SoT gets it right in isolated instances. Ship-to-ship combat is some of the most fun players can have. There's not much more exciting than sinking or looting an enemy ship, while on the flip side the feeling of loss as you abandon your sinking ship and its content is heavy. This is where SoT shines. The naval combat is fun, especially when your crew is coordinating together as you blast holes in the sides of enemy ships or frantically try to scoop water out of your hold as you try to keep your ship together. However, finding the instance of ship-to-ship combat is few and far between. Players are more likely to have their ship destroyed while they are turning in their fetch quests, or are on shore looking for treasure, than having their ship sunk as a result of ship-to-ship combat. There is no punishment for griefers who camp outposts (killing players near the quest givers as they try to turn in treasure, sinking empty docked ships) or spawn camp. In a game that relies so heavily on the sense of accomplishment from PvP, the feeling is completely ruined by players who have decided to take the easy way out. The game's "Pirate Code" does nothing to deter players who endless grief and troll, for no purpose other than to ruin the experience of other players. Rare is trusting players to self-police and it is already clear, players cannot be counted on to do so. SoT could have been a fantastic and unique experience, but instead it feels desolate and empty, hampered by bad gameplay.