MLB The Show 22 wants me to feel like a winner, but the games economy makes me feel like a loser

gamepur.com:

Baseball is a slow, plodding, increasingly antiquated mess of a sport. It has the longest calendar and the most games played of any of the American major sports, meaning that a single game or even a single series can mean next to nothing. Yet I can’t stop myself from playing baseball games every year, because there is a pace to MLB The Show 22 that becomes comfortable. Within the span of about one or two seconds, you have to identify a pitch, hover the aiming marker over the right spot, then swing at exactly the right time. A single millisecond early or late is the difference between a game-winning home run and a lazy fly ball that can’t even be carried out of the infield.

That all sounds a tad overwhelming, and honestly, sometimes it can be. Sometimes you get into do-or-die situations when a fastball you’ve driven to center for 3 doubles hits the exact same spot and is caught by the pitcher. The inning is over. It’s that kind of potential that makes baseball work for me. It’s a game where failing seven out of ten times is expected. Yet I’m woefully disappointed in my own mistakes.

Over the last two years, Sony San Diego has spent most of the resource budget porting the game to other major platforms. The developers even went so far as to add two lower-end difficulties to help with onboarding. If you’re picking up MLB The Show for the first time, you’re in a fantastic spot. Once you understand how to succeed, you try to go one layer deeper and succeed at the game’s big year-long live service hook, Diamond Dynasty.

Gacha mechanics and their inclusion in massively popular AAA games have been a hotly contested issue for over a decade now. While blind boxes can add some lighthearted randomness to a game, they can also cause