MVP Baseball 2004

Instead of slumping in its sophomore season, MVP streaks to the top of the standings with an outstanding ballgame.

MVP Baseball 2004?s development team at EA Canada must really need a vacation?never before has a sports game improved so much and added so many new features in a single season. It may not be the league-leader in every category, but excellent performances across the board make it the best baseball game of the year.

Fall Classic
An avalanche of new features and sweetly refined controls ensures that MVP lives up to its name. The robust Dynasty mode is bursting with baseball goodness as EA Sports sprung for the licenses of every MLB team?s real-life AA and AAA minor-league squads. The impressive Franchise mode in rival game MLB 2005 bests it in terms of overall depth and detail, but being able to play games at three levels of baseball is just really cool for serious baseball fans. The Dynasty mode also challenges you to achieve team goals and manage player salaries, team chemistry, player happiness, and trades.

On the flip side, managing a franchise across three leagues may be too daunting for the casual fan, and unfortunately MVP lacks a straight-up Season mode that strips away these complexities. Several great tools streamline the details, leading off with the innovative sim options. You can switch between playing and simming any game at any point in the game, or you can blast through a game from the Manager screen in a couple minutes by telling batters to bat or bunt, and pitchers to avoid, walk, or challenge batters. Slick depth charts, trading blocks, and detailed player types (ranging from AAA Starter to MLB Indispensable) also provide valuable aids.

Great little touches on the field help a lot too. A pop-up menu lets you warm up batters, pinch hit, or check your pitch history without wading through menus. Mound visits are more than a cut-scene, positively or negatively affecting your pitcher?s performance. Overall, the gameplay benefits in a big way from this more realistic, true-to-baseball atmosphere.

Gold Glove
MVP?s pitching controls remain the best in baseball, using a golf-style meter that captivates by involving you in whether the pitcher nails his spots?or misses wildly. The right analog stick is now employed to control sliding and whether fielders jump or dive. Between deciding when you slide and the great picture-in-picture windows, the base-running is also topnotch.

The fielding has also improved greatly, most notably by allowing players to begin charging their throw meter before the fielder is ready to throw, eliminating those galling delays that plagued last year?s game. Adding the ability to dive and jump is also huge, but confining it to the right analog stick is not?sometimes it?s hard to move your thumb quickly enough to make a tight play, and a controller-configuration option would?ve been awesome. Lastly, the batting controls require a smart approach at the plate?if you don?t adjust your swing to match pitch location, you?ll get nothing?a setup that may discourage more casual players.

Sparkling Diamond
Visually, MVP flat-out smokes the competition with lush lighting, colors, and details that richly portray each ballgame. The players? faces are uncannily lifelike, and solid animations move them smoothly through each play. The Xbox version looks the best, of course, with the PS2 trailing behind the slightly more detailed GameCube version. As usual with EA, only the PS2 version supports online play, which nudges the prettier GameCube version into the third ranking. Tight, lively commentary by Giants announcers Dwayne Kuiper and Mike Krukow is paired with useful player chatter to deliver strong audio.

If one or another of MVP?s minor flaws disagrees with you too strongly, 989 Sports? MLB 2005 offers an excellent alternative. But for most sports fans, the sizzling performance of MVP is enough to keep them satisfied all season long.

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