I stayed away from my 360 yesterday to get a review draft worked up and get a small break from actually playing the game in the hopes of restoring some much needed perspective after spending four days constantly looking for what doesn't work.
At this point I have my review written, but I'm sitting on it until I have a chance to play a couple online games tonight and maybe one or two more offline games just to see if they feel any different post patch.
I've read some forum comments that indicate people are seeing hitters take the occasional strike, which still isn't great but better than what I've experienced (where they take none). There's at least one guy speculating that leaving Precision Pitching (basically three step pitching instead of two) turned off helps with having batters take the called strikes here and there. He could be on to something because I enabled that feature early on.
In any case I should point out that despite mostly posting about the stuff I'm not seeing, there's a decent baseball game here. (Crash issues aside.) It really depends on what you want to get from it. If you just want to fire off something that looks and feels like baseball, you'll be able to enjoy this. It's not a bad game by any stretch. There's just a lot of wonky stuff in there that is sure to turn off people who have certain hot button issues, like the balls and strikes thing. If I didn't have another option, I could live with that. But I do have another option, so once the review is turned in, I'm probably done with 2k9. (I picked up The Show on my lunch break tonight. Can't wait to dig into that.)
When all is said and done, I'd say MLB 2k9 is a solid B game *if* you factor out the crashing issues I've experienced. I'm not sure what I'm going to rate it for the review because I do have to account for all those lockups I've experienced. That's not acceptable, but how much to take off for something that may only affect a small percentage of users, I don't know.
