Covering all the bases

• Published date: 24 May 2021
• Author: Hayden Meikle
• Publication title: Otago Daily Times: Web Edition Articles (New Zealand)

From: Sony Interactive

For: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X,

Xbox One

Rating: (G) ★★★★

Yes, you read that correctly. A Sony game — and an elite sports title that has long been exclusive to PlayStation — published on Xbox for the first time. These are indeed strange times.

A sign of cross-platform brotherhood in a post-Covid world? Not quite. This was a decision made by Major League Baseball Media, the game's co-publisher. Extraordinarily, The Show was made available on day one to Xbox Game Pass subscribers, so its player base must have doubled if not trebled.

And that's a good thing, because this — as usual — is a good game. In fact, it may be at the point where it is the genuinely the most accurate sports simulation of them all, besting the likes of powerhouses Fifa and Madden, which are great and all but have plateaued in recent years.

The advantage baseball has over those other codes, in terms of recreating it in a video game, is its relative simplicity (ignoring the remarkable depth of statistical analysis) and its pace.

Most of the action involves just two people at a time — the pitcher and the batter — and while the ball fairly whizzes over the plate, the broader game action is fairly sedate.

So, it all looks incredibly lifelike, from the great stadiums like Fenway Park to the great players like Mike Trout.

This is the first baseball game for the new generation of consoles (I played on a PS5) and you can just feel and see that lift in smoothness and processing power, especially in the little details around the diamond.

Quick loading screens get you straight into the action, and while the game does not hold your hand, it does give you every opportunity, through tutorials and a vast range of difficulty...