Remember when the Wii was just a baby?
And we were like, “Well, you know, these sports games don’t look very good now, but
let’s just give the developers some time.
They’ll come around.
I mean, the Wii is like two GameCubes taped together.”
Well, it’s 2012...and they haven’t come around.
In fact, here we are, in the last few months before the system is replaced, and the Wii
is still getting sports games that look like they’re running on two Nintendo 64s taped
together.
And the latest in the line of hideous, washed-out, third-party visual vomit is MLB 2K12.
Play ball.
Let’s set some things straight right up front here.
The Wii gets this rap about being a system that emphasizes control over graphics, and
in a sense, that’s true.
Control has long-been what the Wii does best, but the truth is, it can also do amazing visuals.
Go ahead and ask Mario Galaxy, Skyward Sword, Silent Hill, MadWorld, Muramasa, Metroid and
Xenoblade what they think about the “control over graphics” argument.
See, the thing is, they’re not mutually exclusive and the Wii can do both.
So when games like this come along and people say, “Well, we really focused on the controls
during development,” what they really mean is, “Well, we gave the Wii version to our
B-team and told them to make sure we can port it to the PS2.”
I mean, I live in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, but MLB 2K12 makes Pittsburgh
look like it did a hundred years ago...that is to say, smoggy
and hellish.
MLB 2K12 comes to the Wii much in the same way MLB 2K11 did, in a form that’s virtually
indistinguishable from prior versions.
On decade-old consoles.
Not only has MLB 2K12 been beaten with an ugly stick on Wii, it’s also scaled back
in terms of its features.
This is the definition of a me-too product, a game that was developed with minimal budget
to sell to the minimal audience that buys Wii sports games.
The game at least plays well, but not well enough to be some kind of saving grace.
You’re swinging the remote to bat, you’re flicking it to throw...it feels so 2008, you’re
going to swear you’re in some kind of time warp.
Some cruel, torturous, lazily developed time warp.
The quality gap between the Wii version of MLB 2K12 and the HD version is much wider
than it should be.
There’s no reason for this game to be this bad in terms of its presentation, and because
of that, there’s almost no one I’d recommend it to.
If you want to play MLB 2K12, get it on your HD console.
If you’re a Wii owner with no alternative, I’m truly sorry.
We’ve had it good on Wii, but when it comes to sports games, we got benched a long time
ago.