Game Focus writes: "When it comes to baseball games, I was (and somewhere deep in my heart I still am) a huge fan of the MVP Baseball series and since the franchise went out, I never touched a baseball game since MLB The Show 07. So when I first heard of MLB Power Pros last year, a big "huh?" came up and didn't really pay too much attention to it. Couple of months later, I came to realization that the game was very interesting and offered almost everything any other baseball game could've offered. During that time, I found out that the series was best known as Jikkyo Powerful Pro Yakyu in Japan, that it has been imported from Asia to North America last year on consoles after many successful Japanese versions of the game since 1994.
Basically, after learning all this, I was willing to give the franchise a more-than-serious look."
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?"
