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After months of pretty clear rumors, we finally have an official pre-announcement for the next Super Mega Baseball game. No real details in the post, but the developers at Metalhead express a lot of gratitude to EA Sports and generally make the point that this is very much a game they would have made by themselves but with better resources and support from their new publisher, with more information to come on Tuesday, May 2nd.
A recap of what we know so far: We can be pretty confident the title will be Super Mega Baseball 4 thanks to the Taiwan ratings board. The ratings board description of the game also casts some doubt on SMB4 potentially adding an MLB license, since it calls it a baseball game with “fictional cartoon characters.” We can also surmise the game was quietly delayed from its original expected release date. EA earnings calls said the new Super Mega Baseball would come out in EA’s Q4, which ended April 1st. We should know a lot more very soon.
Whiting out the PlayStation TV blacklist
Because there’s no easy and reliable way to record gameplay footage straight off of a PlayStation Vita (a handheld game console), I’ve been using the strange, unloved device called the PlayStation TV instead. The PSTV is a non-handheld variant of a Vita basically. (The PlayStation TV name was always a little weird. I bet Sony’s marketing were frustrated they had already used PlayStation TV when they ended up selling an OTP TV service not long afterwards. They had to call that cable alternative PlayStation Vue instead.)
The PlayStation Vita is full of weird little features that can’t work on a non-handheld version of the console (the craziest example: a touchpad on the back of the console as well as the touchscreen on the front). The PSTV gives you weird button combinations you can use to simulate touchscreen inputs and things like that, but there’s no great way around it. Some games simply won’t be playable without a camera, or without a touchscreen, or whatever.
The PSTV has a terrible non-solution for this issue: There is a system blacklist that tells the PSTV not to launch certain games. If you try to run one of these games, you will get an error message saying it isn’t available on this system.
Theoretically this is to stop users from having a bad time trying to play incompatible games, but in practice:
- Lots of totally playable games are blacklisted on PSTV for no clear reason
- There’s no good place to see an up-to-date list of which games are blacklisted
About a third of the baseball games I own for Vita are blacklisted on PSTV. The only solution, unfortunately, is hacking the PSTV to remove the blacklist. I absolutely recommend following these steps, because at least in my cases with these baseball games, every one of them is totally playable on PSTV. The worst inconvenience I’ve faced so far is MLB 12 The Show‘s start screen requiring a touchscreen swipe, which you can fake on PSTV with a button combination.
Anyway, probably you don’t need to record Vita videos too often, but if you do and if you need to hack your PlayStation TV: I recommend simply following this guide to the word from start to finish. Ignore any YouTube videos (they get out of date quickly and tend to not share all the steps needed). Don’t assume you’ve done enough of the hack and can get started playing your game now. Follow the guide all the way through, and that will keep everything simple.
Road to the Show mode exposed
I saw some chatter online complaining about the Road to the Show mode in MLB The Show 23, with some replies to those complaints saying “Well, you can always go back to The Show 20.” So I played an hour of each recently to get a sense of the differences:
I want to keep diving in more, but a quick list of differences:
- 23 includes cutscenes and audio drop podcast things featuring MLB Network guys talkin’ ball. I don’t personally get a lot out of these, but hey, it’s new content. Probably this stuff will be really charming to watch one day years from now when I can’t turn on the TV and see 24 hours of Chris Russo whenever I want.
- 23 is linked into Diamond Dynasty cards in an unnatural way that I’m still trying to figure out. It’s technically less Diamond Dynasty-ish than last year’s, I think. Last year you could pay 3,000 stubs for a card that would zoom your Road to the Show player up to nearly 70 overall right away, basically zipping you straight to the majors.
Now the most important cards (skill sets) are locked behind completing missions (record 20 putouts/get 10 hits/etc.). The less important perk cards can be bought from the Diamond Dynasty market still, but you’re limited to only two of them at first. You will earn a random selection of these perks in card packs along the way, but you may wind up with perks that only helps pitchers while you’re a position player, and vice versa.
These missions can’t be completed by simming, so you have to play the games manually to efficiently level your character. Otherwise you’re just waiting on natural attribute progression, which is slooooow. - The missions in 23 seem to have some balance issues. One of the repeatable missions is getting 20 assists. Since I’m playing an outfielder, I may not get 5 assists all year, but it gives me the same amount of progress as recording 20 putouts (which I will do seven times a year). I suspect it’s much easier to progress as a shortstop who will get 500 assists+putouts in a year rather than an outfielder, who will total out to 150 or so.
- 20 has a rivalry/friendship system that’s just barely remaining in 23. It’s early going here but this system looks kind of fun? And it looks like something that will bring more meaning to the big leagues part of the game, which is badly needed when otherwise, making the majors feels like beating the mode.
- 23 has little practice minigames that don’t seem to be in 20. They’re okay.
- Practicing in 20 increases your cap for a certain attribute, it looks like, rather than just increasing the attribute. This feels pretty meaningless and unsatisfying. It’ll be dozens of hours before I can reach the cap in any of my stats anyway.
- The combine-type thing at the start of 20 is pretty fun, and has seemingly a big influence on your starting attributes.
So I’m mixed on both, I guess is the impression here. Road to the Show used to be the biggest, best single player mode but it’s been eclipsed by Diamond Dynasty for years and years now. It seems like they’re still putting some effort into it every year, but in both 20 and 23 the mode feels really bereft of good game design decisions. It’s advertised as an RPG mode, but there are no interesting decisions to make on increasing your player’s attributes, and the dialogues are truly paper-thin, little three-line conversations with a coach that look interesting in a trailer but have no real content.
It is still fun to crank through 20 games as a hitter and track your rise to the majors, but progress is so slow and the decisions are so few and far between. Power Pros has done this type of mode right for decades, either with Success or My Life. I’m sure it’s a lot of work but man, if only The Show could follow that example with this mode.