As you may know, the demo for 2K Sports' MLB 2K10 came out today for XBox 360. After playing a handful of games in the demo, I've already drawn some opinions about it. Mainly, 2K Sports is successfully making strides to build back up its baseball series. In my opinion, MLB 2K7 was a very good baseball game, but since then, 2K8 and 2K9 have dropped the ball, no pun intended.

Let's start with the good. The analog stick pitching mechanic that was introduced in MLB 2K8 has been highly refined. This is by far my favorite part of MLB 2K10. As a pitcher myself, if the pitching mechanic in a game is broken, the game is usually dead on arrival for me. 2K10 has built on the mechanic that was created in 2K8, what in my mind is the best pitching mechanic in a baseball game.

The pitching, hitting, and fielding animations are really good. As any huge baseball fan will tell you, they can tell you who is hitting by their batting stance, and who is pitching by their windup. MLB 2K10 has nailed this. In the demo you get to replay last years World Series between the Phillies and Yankees. From what I've seen, both rosters' batting stances and windups are perfect. Too many "default windup 1" and "default batting stance 6"s can really take you out of the game. It doesn't look like that will be an issue for MLB 2K10, but we'll have to see when the full game is released.

Here is the bad, and hopefully this was just a demo issue. The default camera for batting is pretty impossible to hit with. The camera is setup about where the catcher's head would be. This is a problem because you get no depth perception, making it extremely hard to determine when to swing. Hopefully, and I assume this is the case, there will be other choices for batting cameras in the full release.

I'm very impressed with what 2K Sports has done with this year's iteration in their MLB 2K series. I'm actually very excited to get my hands on the release of the game. If you're on Xbox 360, DS, or Wii, you'll be very happy with this game. However, if you're on a Sony platfrom, I still think MLB 10: The Show is the way to go. This year is the first time in a long time that it looks like its a very close race on the PS3. Recently, The Show has been dominating on the system, but this year I don't think you can really make a bad choice.

Both MLB 2K10 (Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, PS2, DS and PSP) and MLB 10: The Show (PS3, PS2 and PSP) are releasing on March 2nd 2010.