The Sony Playstation's baseball season is off to a great start. Now enter last years Champion Sony's own MLB series. MLB 2000 is the first baseball title to be released under the 989 Sports label. It completely holds up to Sony/989 Studios' reputation for quality baseball.
This is no run of the mill junk game. MLB 2000 is for serious baseball gamers. The graphics have yet again improved from last years outing. The background stadiums are much smoother from MLB '99. The colors are darker and sharper than ever. The players themselves are about the same from '99. Still a bit pixleated, and the players shadows are way too digital looking.
The polygons are smooth and hold together except for the around the edges, which is as about as good as Playstation gets any how. The control is much better this time around. The problems MLB '99 had with the fielding has been completely overcome.
Legendary announcer Vice Scully is back as MLB's color commentator. For some reason he has more of a robot sounding voice for 2000. It feels forced. One of MLB's all time faults from MLB 98 to the current MLB 2000 is the way a player just magically disappears once struck out. Even the lesser baseball titles have the player walk on and off homeplate. MLB has always had trouble in this area. This is not a big deal, and perhaps they're using the extra memory they save for more colors and sounds, but it just loses the realism when the player disappears faster than Star Wars movie tickets. Overall MLB 2000 is a step up from MLB '99. So it is worth an upgrade to Y2K.
PUBLISHER: 989 SPORTS
GRAPHICS: 9 MUSIC & SOUND: 8 CONTROL: 9.5
SECRETS: 6 ORIGINALITY: 7 FUN & REPLAY: 10
OVERALL: 9
