It's a swing and a miss for MLB Power Pros 2008.

I like baseball. I don’t love baseball, and I’m most assuredly not in love with it. Still, with the success of WiiSports, one could see how fun MLB Power Pros 2008 could be on the Wii even if you weren’t a baseball enthusiast.

MLB Power Pros masquerades itself (perhaps it Miisquerades? No? Fine.) as a cartoon baseball game with characters not unlike the Nintendo Mii’s and gameplay not unlike WiiSports baseball. Once you’re past the title screen it will shatter those preconceptions with the first of many option screens that will pepper your poor face with options like so much vice-presidential buckshot. This isn’t a cute and fun baseball game, this is for that “hardcore” crowd that doesn’t so much play sports games as much as they live them.

As far as I am concerned (this review being entirely about how I am concerned) MLB Power Pros 2008 fails no matter how you slice it. Many have said that it might turn off sports games enthusiasts with its cartoonish nature. True, very true in fact, but at least they won’t purchase this game. What about the people who were duped into thinking this would be a lighthearted baseball game that would make use of the Wii’s unique and baseball appropriate motion sensor system? For all intents and purposes 2K Sports is saying this with the box art alone.

There is only one way to play MLB Power Pros 2008 with the Wii’s engaging and easily adapted to baseball motion-sensing system. You must disconnect your Wii Nunchuk and play Exhibition (one or two games, no season or MLB Life mode) or Home Run (batting over and over again). Everything else in the game has to be played in the “nunchuk attached” version of the game that specifically disposes of the Wii’s fun and intuitive motion-sensing system, a system that lends itself so obviously to baseball that one would have to either hate baseball or hate Wii owners not to implement it in a baseball game for the Wii.