Major League Baseball 2K5 adds quite a few new things, but these are not enough to overcome its gameplay flaws.
The game now allows you to opt for a less realistic style of play called "Videogame". This allows you to perform showboat moves when fielding, and also allows you to enter SlamZone, which you mash buttons to determine if you hit a home run if you succeed in lining up the batting cursor with the incoming pitch location. However, if you want to play a more traditional style, you can choose "Pure Baseball".
Along with the regular Season, Franchise, GM Career, and Tournament modes, the Gamecast and Situation modes return in MLB 2K5. Gamecast mode is a barebones text manager mode, and doesn't have all the options found in MVP Baseball's Manager mode. The Situation mode also isn't as fully featured as in MVP Baseball. There is also Home Run Derby, and a unique mode called In Your Face, in which Face Points are awarded for accomplishing tasks that you can use to disable your opponent's abilities, such as disabling Turbo or power swings.
The Skybox, like other 2K sports games, is an area that displays your trophies, allows you to view your user stats, and access unlockables, like classic teams, jerseys, and stadiums. There are three variations of the Skybox to choose from, each with different layouts. There is a Game Room section in the Skybox, that allows you to play air hockey, shuffleboard, trivia, and darts, which appears for the first time in a 2K sports game Skybox.
The core gameplay has a undergone a few changes. You can choose from a few pitching interfaces, such as the new Zone and classic mode. The Zone interface controls the location of your pitch with a cursor that moves horizontally, then vertically, much like shooting free throws in NBA Live. The batting interface has remained the same, with both contact and power swings. The ability to check your swing has been added by tapping the swing button, but the window of opportunity is small, so most of the time you'll swing through instead. Another new addition is similar to the mistake pitches in MVP Baseball, when occasionally the pitcher will tip off the location of his pitch, and a ball will appear in the strike zone before the pitch, allowing you to react appropriately. The confidence gameplay element from last year remains.
In addition to normal game challenges, Gameday challenges and Home Run Inning have been added, which are additional ways to earn tokens to access unlockables in the Skybox. Also, at the end of the third inning, the game will present a trivia question to you on the stadium scoreboard, and award tokens if you answer the question correctly.
MLB2K5 introduces an interesting way to play the game, in what it calls BaseBurner mode. You can now switch control from the batter and play as a runner. As a runner, you can control the amount you lead off and dive back to the bag on pickoff attempts, as well as advance or retreat on batted balls. While in this mode, you can instruct the batter to bunt, swing, take a pitch, or be selective.
There are some new additions to the controls. The most significant changes are the addition of a turbo button and the use of the right thumbstick. Turbo impacts the gameplay significantly, as it affects the speed which your fielders will run, as well as how hard their throws are. Like MVP Baseball, the right thumbstick now allows you to attempt diving or jumping catches and wall climbs when fielding, or control slides when baserunning.
There are some minor control additions as well. As a pitcher you can fake throws to intimidate base runners. While fielding, there's a smart throw feature that will let the CPU choose the most appropriate base to throw to, but many times, it doesn't make the best choice. For example, if a runner is on second and you field a ground ball, the CPU will choose to throw to third, instead of getting the force out at first. You can still manually throw to a base of your choosing, of course.
Baserunning, something hard to do well in a baseball video game, is implemented awkwardly, and requires more management of your runners than needed. First, MLB 2K5 separates the runners in the corners of the screen, instead of a small window like in MVP Baseball 2005. Each runner has a button assigned to him, so you can individually select him. Instead of signaling to a runner the base to run to, you queue up bases by pressing the left trigger. You can advance or retreat all runners using left or right on the D-pad. In addition, tapping the runner's corresponding button repeatedly will give the runner a speed boost. Unfortunately, it becomes necessary to do this to beat out close plays, and realistically, you can only do this for one of your runners. The baserunning system requires you to be nimble with your fingers, and isn't as intuitive as it is in MVP Baseball 2005.
Last year's game had fielding issues, and things haven't improved in MLB 2K5. Fielding is still a nightmare, with errors and wild pitches fairly common.
MLB 2K5's player models haven't improved, and are just not as good as MVP Baseball 2005's models. The players aren't as detailed, and player faces don't have that uncanny resemblance to real life players as they do in MVP Baseball 2005. The animations aren't fluid either. The players look too stiff, and instead of smoothly transitioning between animations, there are jerks in between. Curiously, 720p support, which was available in last year's game, has been removed.
However, the stadium graphics are improved, offering more than just night and day versions of stadiums. You can choose from several weather settings, as well as wind settings, and three time of day options: twilight, nighttime, daytime, each giving the game a different look. Stadium specific features are still featured, such as the apple at Shea Stadium. In stadium scoreboards have improved slightly. Some will reflect the actual score, as well as display a portrait of the current batter, while other sections will still be static. Crowd graphics and cutscenes have always been prevalent in the 2K sports games, and while MLB 2K5 has more crowd cutscenes than MVP Baseball 2005, sometimes the crowd can look like zombies, for example during the 7th inning stretch.
A neat feature is the simulation of the passing of time during day games, which the game accomplishes by dynamically changing the shadows as the game progresses. Another minor presentation addition is the dynamic camera that occasionally kicks in, which follows your batter around the bases after the ball is hit.
One of the more enjoyable parts of the audio in previous games were the player specific hecklers, and this year, there are even more of them. It's impressive how many players will have specific comments directed at them, even for non star players. In addition to single hecklers, the crowd will also start player specific chants, such as for Derek Jeter or Moises Alou. Generally the crowd remains attentive to the game, no matter the situation. However, it's worth mentioning that the sound of the ball making contact with the bat is comical. Unlike a solid crack, it sounds more like a wham.
The broadcast team is made up of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, with Karl Ravech providing the game previews. Miller and Morgan offer plenty of insight into the game of baseball, such as when they answer fan mail questions, but too frequently the commentary is outright wrong, such as indicating the wrong game number in a series, or the wrong player making a play, or calling a ball fair when it's heading foul. Admittedly, the game does resemble an ESPN broadcast. Replays will show the Zone after a strikeout or a home run, or the pitch sequence after a strikeout, and scores from other games will appear at the bottom of the screen.
However, like last year's game, there are plenty of glitches and annoyances. As mentioned previously, baserunning could be implemented better, and an annoying thing is once you put the ball into play, the lead runner isn't automatically selected. Instead, the batter is the one automatically selected. So for example, if you had a runner on first, and wanted to advance him to third on a single, you have to first select him, then press the left trigger to instruct him to advance to third. The lead runner should automatically be selected so right after the ball is hit, you can immediately tell him to advance more than one base.
Another glitch is that if you dive for a ball with an infielder and miss, the game will naturally switch the active fielder to an outfielder. However, your outfielder will also dive, usually when you don't want him to, and can cause plenty of frustration as a single turns into an extra base hit.
When the CPU makes a steal attempt, there's no indication that it has done so if you're in the pitcher view, so you won't know to throw to catch the runner. Also, rarely does the game announce when the CPU has brought in a new pitcher. There are issues with the commentary as well, such as when long commentary gets cut off, or when the CPU pitches out when it wants to intentionally walk you, but the announcers treat it as if the CPU was missing the strike zone. In addition, I also encountered a number of game freezes.
The MVP Baseball series has raised the bar so high for baseball video games, and unfortunately, Major League Baseball 2K5 just doesn't belong in the same ballpark. While the presentation is adequate, the gameplay issues and bugs are impossible to ignore for a second straight year. Until those problems are ironed out, MVP Baseball is by far the better baseball game.