GB reports:
''The visual style to MLB Power Pros 2008 is very unique, especially given the nature of the gameplay. When you look at the box art you know that this is not your typical looking baseball game. When summing up the style, one word immediately comes to mind: cute. Yes I said it; MLB Power Pros 2008 is cute. Each MLB character is quite stylized and looks like nothing seen in a baseball video game. The best way to really describe the players would be to say they are really "Mii'ed" out. That being said you will definitely recognize the big name players. For example, Manny Ramirez' character has long braided hair while Chase Utley has his trademark sideburns. Each character is well animated too. Such things as jumping for a skipping ball, sliding into home plate, or diving for a foul line grounder are all very well done. I was somewhat taken back by the amount of animation in such a cute looking game. Heck, I was even surprised by how the batter's eyes would not only follow a ball across the plate, but how there were very distinct facial animations for specific swings too.
As for the stadiums and crowds, I was somewhat impressed with what I saw. Unlike fellow staffer Trevor H, who reviewed the PS2 version of this game, I liked how each stadium was represented and what I saw on screen. For example, we were in Los Angeles for E3 in mid July and we got some time to attend a Dodgers baseball game. It was my first time at Dodger Stadium so I took in the sights. So when I played a game in Power Pro 2008 with their representation of the same stadium I could recognize everything right down to the placements of the famed two scoreboards in left and right outfield. The best way to define each stadiums depiction in the game is that they are a cartoonized version of the real thing, simple but quite effective. As for the crowds in each stadium, they were just as cute as the characters on the field. That being said they were rendered in a lower resolution then the on-field characters, and there were quite a few of the same types of individual crowd members, but they were colorful and managed to fill the seats quite well. They also moved a bit to give the crowd some life but it was nothing special.''
Don’t like sports? There’s a whole segment of games you can immediately write off, as far as you’re concerned. Or can you? You don’t have to be a comics fan to like Batman: Arkham City, and the appeal of Mario isn’t just limited to plumbing aficionados. Brad Woodling and Graham Russell are here to help with a list of games you should check out even if they have sports in them, because you’re missing out on a lot of fun.
WorthPlaying writes: "If you're yearning for the days of earlier sports titles like Tecmo Bowl and haven't been able to get into current- or last-gen sports titles due to their complexity, you might find something to love in MLB Power Pros on the PS2. It's not as deceptively simple as the cover art seems to suggest, and there are still some hardcore elements to the season setup (i.e., the trades system, overall managerial duties), but the core gameplay is about as simple as you can get. The pitching, batting and fielding mechanics are easy to figure out, which make this a pretty solid introduction to the sport for new players, and players jaded by the sheer amount of options that most sports titles bombard you with nowadays."
GamingTrend writes: "Baseball is a weird sport. There really shouldn't be anything too exciting about it, in all honesty. There's only so many things that can happen on the field, and a very strict template as to how the game should be played. There isn't half the strategy of football, the pure athleticism of soccer and basketball, or the brutality of hockey, but there's still something charming about baseball that's missing in many other sports.
For those reasons, there's something about baseball that always eludes game developers as well. What do people like about baseball? The home run? The ballpark ambiance? 100 mile-per-hour fastballs? There are very few games that get baseball right, and I'm happy to say that MLB Power Pros 2008 is one of them. Where does it excel? Where does it fall short? And why does a game with such cartoonish graphics feel more like baseball than a lot of more "realistic" baseball games?"
