There are just some things sports video games can’t seem to get right about the sports they try to realistically recreate. For instance, NBA 2K makes it nearly impossible to produce the kind of sloppy play and mental errors to generate the number of turnovers that you see in a typical NBA game. The NHL series can’t provide an AI opponent that doesn’t connect on an abnormally high percentage of its passes. Madden isn’t able to have its players display even a baseline level of awareness to pick up pass rushers right in front of them or play reliable zone defense at times. It’s these kind of annoying finer details and statistical anomalies that drive offline players nuts when they’re trying to have their games emulate the real thing as much as possible.
MLB The Show 25 plays largely true-to-life in almost every aspect, but it’s not immune from having one bugaboo that breaks immersion and causes your stats over the course of a season to be out of whack. As with earlier entries in the series, the latest edition once again makes it difficult to generate a realistic number of walks. That’s not to say that you won’t be able to work a healthy number of walks if you’re patient enough at the plate. It’s on the mound where the issues persist, as a variety of factors are liable to see your pitches find the strike zone far too often to issue all that many free passes to first base. It certainly doesn’t help that a CPU batter will habitually chase pitches out of the zone, yielding strikeouts that could instead be walks if only they had a slightly better eye.
