– Three small touches I love. 1) The intro changes; they call 2007 “The Year of the Milestone” and mention various milestones and show video packages pertaining to them. 2) I CAN SAVE IN GAME! (except road to the show). 3) In combination with the weirdly selected music (Modern stuff and older stuff), they have clips from actual baseball games. Very cool.
– If connected to the internets, the ticker at the bottom is actually updated for real baseball games. Granted, now it’s spring training, but still very entertaining.
– Franchise mode is largely the same. The menus were shifted around, to the good, but the only major addition is the “Franchise Foundation (or something like that)” page that tells you where all the players come from on your team; very cool. It’s very generic; for Jake Westbrook it just says “1997 – Trade (NYY)” instead of who he was traded for (David Justice; we got something else too, but I forget what). Still, a nice touch.
– Road to the Show has been vastly improved. After every game, you are shown how you get points and where they came from. Goals are much more important and you get points depending on how you did. You also see your role in the organization and where you can go from there. Career Goals are now weekly (or so) instead of yearly and are adjusted to make meeting them more realistic. They also made training part of those Goals; again, very useful. You can also tweak the fuck out of your player if you’re so inclined; you can use an announcer’s name (Buckeye in my case) so you don’t get stuck with being called “#12″ and such.
– Games themselves have improved tremendously. Hitting is much harder, but pitching is also more realistic. They added a break indicator for pitches, which is really, really useful. You can throw sliders now! There’s a great break down of pitches and pitchers. Baserunning was tightened up, and it’s harder to get thrown out. The changes to guess pitch are for shit, though; I recommended going back to the old style. Now, you just get the general location of the pitch, even if you’re right on. Very frustrating.
A full review will be forth coming as I can judge AI and things like that over time.
