Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that I know practically nothing about baseball. It’s not that I don’t like the sport or anything, but I’m Irish, and the nearest thing we’d be familiar with to baseball would be cricket… quite a different beast entirely I’m sure you’ll agree. So it was with a little trepidation that I set aside the best part of a week and a half to learn just what the bloody hell was going on in 2K Sports new baseball title, MLB 2K10.

Fortunately, it wasn’t all that difficult to get to grips with. Sure I’m still a little sketchy on the rules of the game, and I’ve got absolutely no idea about the tactical side of things, or who any of the players are (my entire baseball knowledge consists of one Simpsons episode and a Toronto Blue Jays game at the end of last season).

For these reasons this will be a relatively short review BUT it’ll at least give a fresh perspective on the world of baseball games.

So first up, on loading the game up you’re faced with a relatively straightforward, but somewhat limited, navigation system. It’s not that everything isn’t there, it just feels lacking somewhat. It doesn’t exactly grab you and shout “Hey look! There are LOADS of different and varied things to do here!” like it perhaps should, but that’s a relatively minor complaint.

One that’s not so minor is that every time I play the game for more than 20 minutes, the music starts skipping. It’s an unnecessary annoyance, and surely could’ve been fixed with a little more care and attention – especially after 2K Games telling us just how improved the QA had been this time round (apparently last year’s game was a bit of an unplayable mess at times). Obviously not improved enough gentlemen… at least when it comes to presentation, because when you start playing it’s a pretty decent gaming experience!

If you’re anything like me and less than familiar with the sport, then your first port of call will most likely be the training mode. Bad news however – it sucks. Maybe it makes too many assumptions as to the knowledge level of the player or something, but it really didn’t teach me all that much. Yeah you can swing the bat at a few pitches without worrying about the score, or you can throw a few yourself, or run around in the field… but there’s little by way of instruction, so again, another black mark.

Feeling more than a little frustrated up to this point, I decided to jump into a quick-start match, with default teams and line-ups, to see how I’d fare. The answer, surprisingly, was quite well. In fact, despite taking quite a hefty deficit into the 3rd innings, I quickly found the control system for both pitching and batting to be surprisingly intuitive (with a little help from the manual of course).

We’ll start with pitching first, since that’s probably what most novices will consider the least interesting bit.