The more things change, the more they stay the same.
It is forever the dilemma for companies — even ones with bottomless budgets thanks to the legion of gamers willing to shell out the cash for the base game and extras — churning out sports titles on a yearly basis.
If the game is a success, do you keep it largely the same the following year (or five), thus risking a backlash for delivering a predictable product and not being creative enough?
Or, do you overhaul lots of elements, get rid of some others and risk alienating those who felt the game was close to perfect?
MLB The Show did not used to be a series that had that problem.
It was long acclaimed by many as the best, the deepest and the most accurate game of all the major sports titles, and it blew its one-time opposition, Major League 2K, out of the water.
In many respects, nothing has changed. And that, well, that could be seen as a problem.
The Show 26 is still a marvel of a sports video game but there are now elements starting to appear a little stale.
For a first-timer, it is a phenomenal way to play the game of baseball from your couch.
All the Major League stadiums are replicated in glorious detail, and every team and every star player appear with every bit of statistical background you can imagine.
The game-play options — principally, which control systems you prefer to use for batting and pitching — are deep and relatively easy to pick up.
Hitting that little ball, flung at you with all sorts of movement from sublimely skilled hurlers, with a wooden bat is hard in real life and you will also be challenged in the game, but the pay-off is delightful, and the "crack" sound when you send one over the fence never gets old.
There are plenty of difficulty settings to tweak but it feels like batting, overall, has got a little tougher.
Pitching is still a lot of fun if you have the patience to work a batter over, and a new "bear down" mechanic allows a one-time use of an enhanced pitch in a pressure situation.
Fielding, meh. That has never been much fun and it will be a genius developer who one day makes it so.
Diamond Dynasty — the card-collecting mode and massive revenue earner for the developers — continues to leave me cold, and while Franchise mode is impressively extensive, it simply takes too much time for the average gamer.
Road To The Show, the single-player story mode, where you develop a prospect into a star, is still easily the best way to experience the game, and remains the best mode of its type in any sports series.
There is also a lot to enjoy about playing through the Storylines mode, which is into its fourth year and allows you to learn more about, and play as, stars from the Negro League, such as Roy Campanella and "Mule" Suttles.
One jarring aspect of MLB The Show 26, especially noticeable for someone like me who skipped last year’s game, is that a lot of the visuals appear dated. Some of the close-ups of players and the crowd, in particular, could be straight from an Xbox 360 game.
