I totally missed the tiny indicator in the above picture, and instead, as I tried to start a game, I got the following message: Two things though – first, it took me a while to figure out what was going on. This is interesting – would I rather just sit at a blank installation screen with just a progress bar? Probably not. You can troll around the menus, but not actually play the game. What the game doesn’t tell you, is that there’s a mandatory installation that has to take place before you can do anything. This is a tiny indicator in the upper-left corner of the main menuįinally, I’m in the game’s main menu. But for normal MLB updates, it doesn’t need to be as hard. If you’re renaming the Boston Red Sox to match your local FOX news anchors, I get that you don’t want to accidentally lose all that work. If you’re saving a custom roster file, I get it – for sure, you want to name that.
The Game: Hey there’s a new roster update I would love it if the game would do some hand waving and take care of this behind the scenes. And I always save over the last roster file, and it always asks me to confirm that I’m overwriting it, which always makes me nervous that I’m accidentally saving over the wrong thing.
It’s treated just like any other save file – so the user is asked to name it.
Periodically MLB 14: The Show will ask the user to download a new, updated roster file that matches the current MLB rosters.
However, what I don’t see the use case for, is renaming the MLB roster update file. If you happen to have two gamers in the same household, sharing the same console, I can definitely see the use case there of changing the name of your save file. Either it’s named well enough by default, or you’ll never have more than one of them. It’s fairly common for games to ask the user to name some kind of save file. I’m guessing that the majority of the time, nobody ever needs to change the default name. Would it make more sense to use a more abstract button – like “X” or “O” for example – to commence games? Or just use “press any button”? Why even specify? This is interesting to me I might have to do some more research on how widespread using the Options button for decidedly-not-accessing-options is actually becoming. The Options button is vaguely in the same physical place as the old Start button was. On the PS4’s DualShock 4 controller, the Start button has disappeared, and instead, games seem to be using “Options” in its place. Okay, something new – lets talk about the “Options” button. Load times are really long in MLB 14: The Show, so after waiting a long time to get to the title screen, I have to press a button, then wait some more for the real menu to load. I’ve complained about how useless these are before, and this one is no different, so I’ll make it brief. Playing through games earns experience, allowing me to build up my minor leaguer’s stats, and waiting for that call-up to the majors.Īlong the way, MLB 14 has some difficulties in the way of usability. I almost expect it at this point – that these big sim-style sports games have terrible menus – but that doesn’t make it any better. I started playing through the Road to the Show mode, which has me creating and controlling a lowly minor league ballplayer. If you’ve ever paid attention, crowds in sports games have been laughably terrible for a long time, so I’m excited to see some much-needed diversity in crowd animations.Īnyway, being a sim-style sports game, there are a ton of modes to choose from, and of course, an equal number number of menus to go through.
It’s one of the first sports games to come out on the next-gen console generation (the PS4 in this case), and accordingly, it’s graphically quite sexy. MLB 14: The Show is the latest entry in the Sony-produced series, and basically the only option for fans of baseball sims. Console baseball games are few and far between these days.