Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Disappointing"

This is the only MLB game on the WII and so I bought it. I really did try to love this game and I was willing to get past the graphics since it is on the WII. Playing in an actual game is fun on here--the swinging is pretty cool and the pitching is the best pitching interface I have ever used in a game (I've played the MLB the show series on PS2 for a long time). The actual baseball game is just about the only fun thing about mlb 2k9. The other really awesome part of the game is in Franchise mode, where you can select "Scout finds prospects," which is very realistic but I'll discuss the problem with it below. I'm going to list all of the problems of this game:

1) User is unable to edit their lineup before the game (meaning your starters start every game, even if they are really tired and need a rest day).

2) Able to edit jukebox but unable to save those settings (so you have to listen to a couple of the really bad songs every time).

3) The settings seem to be random in some instances. For example, I chose franchise mode with a playoff option of 5 game division series, 7 game championship series, and 7 game world series and EVERY season I get to the playoffs and every series is 1 game long (I have tried to create other franchises and the same error occurs). Another example is how I played the 2009 season with 162 games, went through the free agent process (also a cool part of the game), and then the next season was 13 games long. VERY annoying. Yet another settings issue is the option of whether or not the user wants to allow other teams to trade, scout finds prospects, inside edge prompts, etc. When you select these options, they work..but even if you save your settings, the next time you load your season, those settings will be changed. This is very aggravating and resetting all of the options for these problems I mentioned end up being time consuming.

4) Baserunning is quite difficult, as the instructions manual is a lump of useless garbage. I had to learn on my own and it is annoying when you want to advance runners on a double and then stop the first runner at first base (it allows this to happen only at random instances).

There are so many more little, irritating problems with this game. I am actually going to put mine up for sale on ebay sometime soon because I have had it with this game. This is the worst baseball game I have ever played (not counting the pitching in Wii Sports baseball). I am going to return to playing my playstation 2 to fulfill my baseball needs (MLB the Show is SO much better and realistic).