This review was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. Its format does not match our own but we support its content. It was written by Aaron Thomas.

For baseball fans, February doesn’t mean cold weather, Groundhog Day, or even Valentine’s Day – it means baseball. It’s the time when pitchers and catchers report to Florida and Arizona for spring training, and it’s also when the current crop of baseball videogames is released. This year there are three very good baseball games for the PS2, and because each game offers something that the others don’t it’s important to check out the reviews for each game so you pick the one that’s right for you. MLB 2K5 has the ESPN license, outstanding commentary, and smooth online play, but it also has several bugs that might be too much for the hardcore fan.

This offseason has seen quite a few changes in the business of making sports games, and while football may have grabbed most of the headlines, the landscape of future baseball games has changed as well. Take-Two has nabbed the exclusive third-party rights to Major League Baseball, but they lost the ESPN license to Electronic Arts in the process. That means that MLB 2k5 will be the last game from Take-Two and developer Kush Games to feature ESPN logos and overlays, but it’s here this year, and it has been implemented perfectly. As soon as you hear the theme from "Baseball Tonight" everything about the game’s presentation is sublime. Jon Miller and Joe Morgan call the action, the K-Zone is used to diagram pitch location, and TV-style replays show off web-gems. Even the little things like the score that’s displayed in the corner and the way the game goes to break in between innings, are all straight from an ESPN telecast. There’s simply no contest from the competition when it comes to how the game is presented; absolutely none.

MLB 2K5 has all of the standard gameplay modes that you would expect to find in a current baseball game. You can play an exhibition mode, start a season, take over a franchise, play as the general manager, challenge someone online, or participate in a home run derby. There are a plethora of options for tweaking the gameplay and presentation, allowing you to get the gameplay just the way you want it. Rest assured, if you’re one of those people that enjoys tinkering with sliders to get things just right, 2K5 gives you the most control.

Home run derby is more than just going deep this year. There are several different ways to go about playing the derby, from hitting as many homers as you can in a set amount of time, to taking three players up against another team of three and bashing home runs in an effort to take down the opposing players’ hit points. You can even call your shot to do extra damage, but call your blast and guess wrong, and the damage goes to your player. It’s an interesting twist on a competition that often gets boring due to a lack of challenge.

The franchise mode is very deep and even allows you some control over your minor league system. If micromanaging isn’t your thing, you can let the computer handle calling up players, leaving you to worry about tweaking your everyday roster. You can make trades, release players and sign free agents – pretty much everything you’d expect in a franchise mode.

On the field, Kush has totally changed the way you play the game, which is a good thing after last year’s disappointing effort. Hitting is simple – you try and guess the location of the pitch, and then take a swing. The square button is a contact swing, and the circle button lets you swing for the fences. Unless you’re down 0-2 and really need to make contact, most of the time you’ll be better off using the power swing. When trying to guess a pitch, you can take a look at your hot/cold zones to see where the pitcher will likely pitch you. If you guess right, the controller will shake, and you’ll know to stay put in order to put some good wood on the ball.

The biggest addition to the hitting interface is the Slam Zone, which allows you the chance to crush a pitch that is in your wheelhouse, or punish a pitcher for hanging a pitch. A few times a game, a cursor will pop up, and you must quickly maneuver it over the pitch location to enter the Slam Zone. The camera will zoom in on the ball and you must quickly tap X to hit the ball as far as you can. The game will prompt you when to swing, and then you just have to sit back and watch how far the ball travels. It’s not always a home run, but it’s always a hit, and it always travels a long way. Whether or not this is a positive or negative really depends on the person playing. It does make the games more high scoring, but it punishes pitchers for making stupid mistakes, so it’s not a total freebie.

Throwing strikes is made simple with the new pitching interface, which offers a great amount of control, and is easy to use. After selecting a pitch, you must tap the X button twice to make two moving bars intersect where you want your pitch. If you miss-time your button press, the pitch will start to wander, generally towards the center of the plate so it’s important to hit your spots. Different pitchers, depending on their control will have slower moving bars, and taking things a step further, each pitcher will have varying speeds for each of their pitches, which reflects their control over each pitch.

Taking the game online is easy and there are a lot of options to make it worth your while. There are leagues and tournaments, and, since baseball’s all about statistics – full stat tracking too. The gameplay is smooth and relatively lag free, but that of course depends on the quality of your connection. Even people with fast connections will experience the occasional laggy pitch here or there, but as a whole, the online mode is very good.

MLB 2K5 is a nice looking game, even without taking into account the ESPN presentation. The players look like their real-life counterparts right down to their batting stance, and there are more varied body types this year, so you won’t be getting Ichiro confused with Albert Pujols.

The stadiums are very detailed, and the game even shows the outside of some of them before games, which is impressive. The fans are 2D and look pretty bad from most camera angles, but on close-up shots, they are rendered in 3D, and look very good.

Even with the ESPN television-style broadcast, the pace of the game is brisk, and should you want to move things along, you can skip all of the cut-scenes. Sometimes you miss the little things like a shot of the pitcher stomping around the mound after a bad pitch, or Nomar doing his O.C.D. routine with his batting gloves, but it’s a small price to pay for moving the game along quickly.

Jon Miller and Joe Morgan, the voices of ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball provide commentary for the game, and are second to none. Miller’s smooth voice calls the action, and Morgan adds his insight from the perspective of a former player. Joe will often tell a story that lasts through an entire at bat, just like commentators do in a real broadcast. Once in a while they will get a bit behind calling the action, on things you wouldn’t expect, like foul balls, but there’s no question that this is the best announcing in a videogame to date.

The music during the game is standard stadium fare, but it’s rather low key. The organ will play tunes like "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window?" and all of the clap-along ditties are there, but you won’t be hearing any "Rock and Roll Part 2" after a homer, nor will you be hearing sirens blare as a player rounds the bases. This is a classy choice, and goes along with the refined commentary of the game, but it may disappoint some people.

You’d think that since menu screens have been around for a good 25 years or so that it wouldn’t be too tough to make them easy to deal with, but 2K5’s menus are cumbersome and poorly named. How the heck is someone supposed to know that "IN YOUR FACE" means "play an exhibition game"? The instruction manual is an atrocity and doesn’t explain the basics of the game, much less what each option does.

While there’s nothing wrong with the franchise mode per se, there are several ways it could be improved. The menus are slow to load, and the screen moving around like a fancy DVD menu after you make a choice is a complete waste of time. Managing rosters, especially minor league players is a chore, and the computer doesn’t make things any easier by fiddling with your batting order before every game. Again, it’s not a bad franchise mode, but it’s a bit boring and not user friendly.

One thing that 2K5 is lacking in the visual department is a large variety of animations. Sure, what is in the game is nice, but after just a couple of games you’ll notice the same animations over and over. Players will hop after fouling off a pitch, thinking it’s a homer, the first baseman will snag line drives the same way… it all looks the same after a while. It would be nice to see more unique home run celebrations, a little more emotion from the players, and smoother fielding transitions next year. Oh yeah, the zombie fans singing "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" look like they are straight out of Resident Evil, and they’ve got to go. It was a nice thought, but it’s just not pretty.

There’s really only one complaint one can make with the game’s audio, and that’s the endless repetition of the Baseball Tonight theme. I love the song as much as the next guy, and nothing says "baseball" like that song, but it is used in the main menus, before the game, in between innings, during in-game menus, and after the game. If you make it through an entire season, you’re looking at hearing that song a good 2,000 times, and no song is tolerable that many times.

If there was one thing that held NFL 2K5 back, it was the abundance of bugs and glitches in the game, and sadly, the same holds true for MLB 2K5. After the sixth inning or so, it’s not uncommon for the computer to uncork wild pitches faster than Rick Ankiel in a playoff game. It’s not just two or three times, but in some cases the wild pitches will total six or more. There are also times where the outfielders won’t pick up a ball, infielders won’t make a throw, or outfielders will let a lazy fly ball hit them in the chest and not get charged for an error. There are also many reports of the game freezing, and I personally had one of my franchise games freeze while I was perusing the box scores. Some people will be able to look past these problems, while serious baseball fans won’t.

ESPN MLB 2K5 features an outstanding presentation and smooth online play, but fails to get a lot of the little things right. Fans of high scoring games, great announcing, slick overlays and camera angles will be happy with 2K5, while people that prefer a more realistic experience with fewer bugs will want to go with MVP or MLB 2006.

It’s tons of fun, but the little thins hold it back.

ESPN stuff is top-notch, the rest is just good.

Jon Miller and Joe Morgan are great. Endless Baseball Tonight theme isn’t.

The home run derby’s fun, and so is the standard game.

Online is smooth. The bugs and freezes hurt how long you will want to play.