MLB 06: The Show is brought to you by the same team that brought you MLB 2006 a year ago. That game, you will recall, was a lively and exciting mix of old-fashioned ballpark charm and slick 21st-century production values, and it drew the praise of dabblers and hardcore fans alike. MLB 2006 was fun and balanced and quick to pick up, but it rewarded the time you gave it. If you kept playing week after week, it held up its end too, offering new surprises and new subtleties the whole season long. It also qualified as real baseball, which is to say that it was a good thing to do while you had a long meandering conversation with your pals about something else. MLB 2006 was great.

One of the hallmarks of game reviews here at Chocolatey Goodness is a relentless, pedantic focus on trivialities that have no bearing on the play experience. Sorry about that. But here is the thing about the MLB series: Last year, and the year before, and the year before that, the numbers were all squiff. The game released just as the 2003 season was gearing up was called MLB 2004. The 2004 game was called MLB 2005. The 2005 game, as you have just read, was called MLB 2006. This was deeply stupid, and it prompted repeated calls in this space for a re-numbering.

Somebody listened. This year’s game carries the correct digits in its title. That should make you happy. If you are a regular reader here, it should make you proud too. What influence we exert, when we come together as a team! Hear us roar! Woot!

OK, that is enough of that.

There is not a lot to distinguish MLB 2006 from MLB 06: The Show. They are the same game, really, except that The Show has up-to-date rosters and knows that the SkyDome is now called the Rogers Centre. When you are about to deliver a pitch, you use the joystick to move a little baseball around a 3x3 grid, which serves as the strike zone. Some of the squares are red and some are blue, to indicate which areas your pitcher handles well and which are dangerous. You push a button to choose a fastball or a curveball or a slider or a changeup (the library of pitches depends on who is on the mound and whether he is a versatile starter or an overpaid reliever). Then, as the windup begins, you must watch a little coloured arc moving through a pitch meter, and you must tap the buttons as the glowing mark hits the sweet spots. It is a pitching experience you will know intimately, if you have played a baseball game in the last ten years, and you will be delighted with its execution here.

It’s not that there’s anything new about the way the mark sweeps over the touchpoints, and it’s not that there’s even anything subtly different from last year’s pitch meter. But this year, when it is more familiar than ever, it feels so comfortable that you can feel OK about looking away from the meter and watching the pitcher himself.

This is actually a big deal. Sports video games all feature the same big-league teams and the same big-league stadiums, so officially nobody should pay much attention to Roy Halladay on the mound, on account of he’s a digital commodity. But The Show tilts in the smartest possible direction. It deliberately plays like other baseball games. It makes the game interface itself the commodity. It tells you up front that the pitch meter is something you’ve seen before, and it makes itself as comfortable in your palms as possible, and it even makes itself as much like other pitch meters as possible. So as Doc winds up, you can watch him instead of the meter. You can concentrate on the arm and not the glowing arc. You can play baseball instead of a video game.

Hitting is like that too, except that there never was a hitting meter and it was always important to watch the batter.