MLB 08 follows up on last year’s critically acclaimed title, MLB 07. This year’s title looks a good deal better than the 07 iteration. The development team put a great deal of enhancement into the textures, lighting engine, and facial details. The game is looking very close to a real baseball broadcast. Sony had MLB 08 side by side with MLB 07 running on identical Bravia XBR LCD’s and the difference was night and day.

The Road to the Show mode has also been enhanced this year to give you better control over your progression to the big leagues. You will have the opportunity to see what tasks will give you how much clout in moving up in your career. This caries over into the franchise mode, where playing above of below a player’s expectations will result in an increase or decrease in compensation. Have a great year with your center fielder and get a contract extension. Play like crap with your star third basemen and you might get traded. It’s little things like this that brings the game closer to reality.

The crowd has been improved since MLB 07. Not only does the lighting engine and texture improvements make the crowd look better than ever, but Sony meticulously detailed how the crowds interact with the game in each stadium. This year you’ll see “K” signs appear exactly where they would in real life in each stadium. You’ll see beach balls bouncing around the crowd and you might catch The Wave a time or two. The coolest feature, in my opinion, is real time scoreboard updates in the stadiums. The Green Monster will have scores in real time from around the league (real baseball, not what’s happening in the game). There is also a ticker running across the screen from time to time with news, stats, and updates from the internet.

MLB 08 will feature custom soundtracks on both the PS3 and PSP. If you don’t like the in-game soundtrack, you can substitute any tracks from your hard drive or memory card to play during the menus and parts of the game. There’s also a good shot at DualShock 3 support making it into the game at release on March 4, 2008. With all the improvements, I can imagine that this will easily take the title of best baseball game on the market.