Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

So the nice folks over at 2K Sports had a press conference, for MLB 2K9 that I, unfortunately missed.  But Chase at AccessPR was nice enough to send over a copy of the game to try out, and I was more than happy to oblige.  Now I must preface this that there is no way I can finish a nine inning game of baseball in 30 minutes.  Anyone that has watch a game of baseball knows that 30 minutes might get you through two innings at best, so I thought I would take a variance on the First Thirty theme and do a First Nine Innings.

I am also going to show my age and tell you that the last baseball game I bought and played on a regular basis was High Heat 2001.  It was a great mix of statistical baseball and graphical on-the-field action.  After that, baseball pretty much disappeared from the PC unless you were playing pure stat based baseball, where text was your baseball diamond.

Starting up my first game, I played as the Chicago White Sox, as I have been a fan of the team since they acquired Carlton Fisk as a catcher from the Red Sox back in 1982.  My opponent for the evening were the Seattle Mariners.  Seattle was a good team for me to come up against, because they were down last year, so my adjusting to the controls might not hurt me.

It took awhile to get use to the stick control for hitting, baserunning, pitching and fielding, but by the fourth inning, I was really getting the hang of it.  By the seventh inning, I had crushed four home runs, and had one player hit for the cycle.  The game is also stunning when watched on a nice, big screen.  My wife came in and mentioned that the game almost looked like a real baseball game.  I got a chuckle when one of the opposing pitchers came in and looked like he was way stoned.  And I even had a pitcher retaliate and throw a pitch square into the middle of my back after back to back home runs.

I have a lot more to say, but I am going to save it for the review.  There is a demo out if you are interested, and I am hoping to have my review up the day before MLB 2K9 hits the shelves.  It will be out on PC, 360, PS3, Ps2 and PSP.