Advocating for better ads
Welcome back to MLB The Show gripe corner, where I complain about a very good game I’ve spent a few hours a week playing for almost twenty years.
MLB The Show has had this problem, without any huge changes, for a very long time. The ads are bad.
MLB The Show 17 on the left, MLB The Show 23 on the right. I’m using my try-hard zoom cam now in 23 but otherwise these two depictions of Angel Stadium are pretty similar.
A lot of screen real estate is taken up by ads. 10-15% I’d guess. I don’t mind that. What I mind is they are all ads for either The Show itself or official MLB partners: MLB Network, MLB.com, the Play Ball initiative, and a few that at least don’t belong to Major League Baseball but are just close business partners, like Nike and Stand Up to Cancer.
See if you notice any difference in the image on the right below.
MLB The Show 23 vs. real-life Angel Stadium, focusing on right field stands for both.
Real-life Angel Stadium photo from this video. There’s nothing particularly iconic and interesting about right field at Angels Stadium which is kind of why I chose to focus on it here. It’s just a bunch of random ads next to each other. But it still looks so much more pleasant than the outfield in The Show for me.
Realism is a huge part of simulation-style sports games, and this is an area where The Show isn’t doing well and never has. The stadiums are modeled really well, but in real life or the game, ads make up a huge part of MLB parks. And The Show has these cheap-feeling ads that promote itself or the league instead of adding to the immersion of virtually experiencing a real big league park.
I am sure it is that way for a reason. I am sure the developers would rather have the real ads, or failing that, a nice variety of ads from real companies, or failing that, a nicely-designed set of fake ads for fake companies. And The Show has been adding in key details over the years, adding a real Coke bottle to Oracle Park and the Chevrolet Fountain at Comerica. At the end of the credits you can see a good little list of partnerships like this they’ve had to clear (under MLB Stadium Branding Partners). It’s a shame that these things have to be piecemeal business deals, but it is what it is. Hopefully they can find a way to get even more of these done in future.
Japan is a different country with different laws, but just to show how nice things could be, in another world:
eBaseball Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2022 on the left, and the real Tokyo Dome, 2023, on the right.
Not many of these ads are exactly the same (though the outfield wall is pretty dang close), but every ad looks genuine and attractive because they’re ALL REAL ADS! And there isn’t a single internal ad for Konami or NPB in the bunch (besides funnily enough at the very bottom right of the real-life Tokyo Dome photo, where there is a Pro Yakyuu Spirits A ad that isn’t in the video game version!).
Doesn’t it just warm your heart? Wouldn’t it be even better if they were all American ads that you’d recognize? I’m tryin’ to get immersed over here, man. Gimme something real!
Okay one more gripe
The Kauffman Stadium fountains looked more natural in MLB 14 The Show. Looks like both games do the same technique where a water texture pattern is moving up-to-down over a flat surface. There’s a slick look to the current PS5 one that in a way reflects the real texture better but also makes the visual trick they’re doing with that pattern stick out more in a bad way. Seeing it in action might help show what I mean.
Man, I want a RetroTINK-4K
I use a RetroTINK-5X video scaler for all my recordings off of old consoles to help bring everything up to 1080p in a clean and accurate way. If you upload anything less than 1080p to YouTube, it makes sure to spit on every pixel and the bitrate is more like a badrate.
But technology marches ever forward, and my main computer monitor is 1440p and my main TV is 4K, so these recordings can still grate the eye a little these days. So now I hear a new expensive toy is on the horizon for late 2023, the RetroTINK-4K.
I can’t promise I’ll actually get one of these soon given the sticker shock on that news post, and my capture card still only supports up to 1080p… And I probably need bigger hard drives if I’m going to start targeting 4K. Okay, there are a lot of issues ahead of me here. But I really want to see some even cleaner, crisper pixels.
YouTube Viewing Guide
- Baseball Mogul 2007 (PC) Gameplay – I read someone say that Barry Bonds plays under a fake name in Baseball Mogul 2007, like he does in other games from around that time like MVP Baseball and All-Star Baseball. I thought that was odd since Baseball Mogul doesn’t actually have an MLB Players Association license. Well, Bonds is in 2007 and with a photo by his name, so either that rumor was false or Clay Dreslough patched him in years later.
- Pro Yakyuu Super League CD (Mega-CD) Gameplay – Any game with 16-bit graphics and CD-quality audio is high art to me. Even if the audio is Casio keyboard nonsense, I go ga-ga for it.
- Famista (Game Boy) Gameplay – It’s pretty much identical to R.B.I. Baseball, which has to make it one of the ten best Game Boy games. The Game Boy was a gift from God at the time, but if you gave me a choice today between playing two hours of non-Tetris or Pokemon Game Boy games and sitting in a padded white cell with one flickering light for the same amount of time… Go ahead and give me the straitjacket.
- Wonder Stadium (WonderSwan) Gameplay – Basically a port of World Stadium EX for Bandai’s black-and-white doomed Game Boy competitor. Weird to see no color but hear pretty nice voice samples in the audio.
- Backyard Baseball 2006 (GBA) Gameplay – This Game Boy Advance version honestly plays a little better than the original Backyard Baseball. But it must be condemned to the fires of Hell for forcing Pablo Sanchez to use Mikey Thomas’ animations and batting stance. If you’re not prioritizing Pablo, you’ve majorly goofed.