I find it pretty ironic that Andrew McCutchen is the cover star for MLB 13 The Show. Don’t get me wrong, he’s an incredible player, but he’s also the star of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a franchise famous for an incredible losing streak (it hasn’t had a winning season in 20 years).

The Show, however, has been nothing but a winner. The Sony-exclusive baseball series has outperformed its competition (at least in terms of quality), the multiplatform MLB 2K, for years. With the release of MLB 13 The Show for the PlayStation 3 and Vita, that streak seems safer than Ichiro after successfully stealing second base.

But after spending years on top, The Show is starting to feel as stale as a 9th inning hot dog bun.

What you’ll like

Still the best in show

MLB 13 The Show takes one of the most complicated sports ever, which usually involves at least two teams of nine players to play adequately, and turns it into a great gaming experience. Not that it’s the first or only effort to do so, but none can match The Show’s depth and customization.

You can make The Show as complicated (or as simple) as you want with an incredible assortment of options. For instance, you can make pitching as easy as pushing a single button or as complicated as exercising precise movement and timing with the analog stick. You can also opt for the computer to perform some of the more complicated tasks, like baserunning and fielding, automatically.

The Show also excels at presentation, with cameras and commentary that closely resemble the real thing. Anything can happen in baseball, and it seems like The Show is ready for any and every possibility. A pitcher gets hit with a line drive to his driving leg? Yup, they’ve recorded commentary for that.

Even small details, like fans walking up and down aisles in the stadiums, really add to the immersion. Sony Computer Entertainment’s San Diego Studio really delivered an authentic baseball experience.

An incredible career mode

The Road to the Show has long been my favorite part of the series, and it’s still as excellent as ever. This is the The Show’s take on a career mode. You create a player with an assortment of customization options, assign him a position, either enter him in the draft or pick a team for him, and then play through his path from the minor leagues to the World Series.

It’s like a baseball role-playing game. You gain experience for good performances, which you can then use to increase your stats (for example, pitchers can improve their accuracy with the fastball, and hitters can beef up their batting power). Your manager gives you a checklist of goals every couple of weeks, often asking to you improve a single stat or telling you how many hits you need to accomplish during the time frame. Meeting all of these tasks can help further your career. Failing them can send you back to the minors.

Each game you play skips to the parts that concern your player, so a first baseman, for example, would only have to play each of his at-bats and any fielding play involving his position. It’s a fun, efficient, and rewarding way to play baseball, and it’s the closest most of us will come to achieving our big league dreams.

What you won’t like

I’ve already seen this show

I’ve established that MLB 13 The Show is a very good baseball game. The problem is that MLB 12 The Show also was. Same for MLB 11 The Show. And MLB 10 The Show. And … well, you get the idea. SCE San Diego figured out the formula for a great baseball experience a long time ago, and while yearly releases are the norm with sports franchises, the incremental improvements from year to year really haven’t added up.

This year’s version does offer some new additions, namely an improved Franchise mode that, frankly, is still far too complicated for my feeble mind. Better is the new beginner mode, which eases inexperienced players into the complicated tasks of hitting and pitching. Of course, that doesn’t mean much to veterans of the series.

It’s a tough problem. I’m certainly glad I’m not a developer, because I have no idea how to fix it. You can’t exactly change the game of baseball, but the market demands a new game every year. Still, the series can’t escape fatigue. From an impassioned critical eye, The Show is as good as ever, but I’m far less enthusiastic about it as I was four years ago.

Conclusion

MLB 13 The Show is still an incredible baseball game. If you’ve enjoyed previous installments in the franchise, then there’s no reason you won’t find a good chunk of entertainment in this year’s edition.

Still, if you own MLB 12 The Show, you’re mostly paying for the updated roster. Some of the incremental changes are nice, but they’re nowhere close to being game-changers.

Score: 83/100

MLB 13 The Show is available now on the PlayStation 3 and Vita. The publisher provided GamesBeat with a copy of the PS3 version of the game for the purpose of this review. I was not able to test the PS3/Vita Cross Play features for this review.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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406 Ventures, whose name derives from Boston Red Sox player Ted Williams impressive batting average, pooled together a new $175 investment fund to invest in enterprise startups.

.406 is based in Boston and provides support for early stage companies, primarily on the East coast.  It compares its investment strategy to successful batting technique, which involves being a “selective hitter” and “only swinging at pitches within the specific areas of the strike zone he knew he could hit best.”

This is .406 Ventures’ second fund and will focus specifically on IT security, healthcare IT, and web infrastructure companies. Existing portfolio companies include Adtuititve, ambient, Bit9, Chosen Security, Mashery and Veracode. Read the press release.

Don’t call it a home run, but slumping deals company Groupon isn’t striking out with Major League Baseball — quite the opposite, actually. The organizations announced Thursday that Groupon is now the official daily deals site of MLB.com.

The arrangement between Groupon and MLB Advanced Media, the interactive media company behind the MLB, is a multi-year partnership where the deal provider will use its GrouponLive events system and its mobile app to serve up deeply discounted offers for some of the 30 professional baseball teams in the league.

Cheap tickets — hey, Padres, you listening? — and sale merchandise are the obvious plays but Groupon said the deals will go beyond discounted goods and admission and cover “unforgettable ballpark experiences.”

That ambiguous statement deserves a snicker or two, though GrouponLive GM Greg Rudin amended his lofty promise by adding that the experiences could be anything from World Series tickets and batting practice opportunities to the chance to throw the first pitch at a game or tour your team’s locker room. Again, Padres, are you listening? Wink. Wink.

Sure, the partnership isn’t the biggest of the deals, but the news certainly beats laying off 10 percent of staff or demoting your CEO.

Since professional baseball is on sabbatical while football and basketball take center stage, you can expect these MLB deals to appear once the 2013 season rolls around.

Photo credit: Andrew Morrell Photography/Flickr

He rushes out onto the court. It doesn’t even feel like a video game. It feels like I’m sitting with my friends watching this game while it’s on live television. Somewhere out there, Jordan is laying a beat down on Magic Johnson, the Lakers’ point guard and top player. I don’t, at any point, feel like I’m physically playing basketball.

“The point of our games is not re-enacting throwing a football, but the spirit of the sport and letting gamers fulfill their sports dreams,” said Andrew Wilson, Electronic Arts’ sports game guru. “These are real players, they are real events and there is real angst — we want to re-enact reality.”

What’s more, sports games have an unrecognized role in driving forward innovation for the entire video game industry. That’s why you should take them seriously, even if you’re a sports-hating nerd who would rather pick up a BFG than a basketball.

I pissed off a few people for making a snarky comment about people complaining about the release of yet another Madden and NCAA Football game from Electronic Arts at the company’s summer games showcase last week. It’s perfectly understandable that someone would complain about the release of yet another sequel that — at face value — doesn’t seem to include new content or innovate at all. To most people’s eyes, the games seem like a roster update and a slightly better graphics and physics engine. But those people are missing the point of sports games.

Take NBA 2K11, for example. The game re-enacts some of basketball’s finest moments, such as Jordan’s famous shrug after he drilled his sixth three-point shot in the first half of game one against the Portland Trailblazers in the 1992 NBA finals. The same is true for other sports games. As a University of North Carolina graduate, I’m a Bulls fan by default. But I was way too young to appreciate that series back in ’92, when Jordan was at his peak. I was 5 years old at the time. This video game helps me relive an experience I missed the first time around.

The games feature hundreds of hours of commentary. And it isn’t from a generic commentator for a sport — sports games makers pull in the same commentators that show up on ESPN and CBS for live sports games. Clark Kellogg and Doris Burke, two well-known reporters in the sports field, show up in games like NBA 2k11. The games feature commentary that really feels equivalent to a live sports game.

“When I look at the various people out there criticizing the franchise, they’re not sports fans, and that’s okay because there are a lot of people who are,” Wilson said. “If you ever ask a sports fan, there’s a reason the sports category is one of the top categories in games — it makes up around 20 percent of the game industry.”

Most of the heckling I took from that comment came from gamers saying that they should simply go out and actually play football. But these sports video games aren’t designed to replace that experience. The act of playing a sport is something that binds us together as human beings. Games like soccer and tennis transcend nations, ideologies and religion — they are games we all feel a deep connection to, and physically playing that sport will never be replaced.

And, after all, you wouldn’t want to feel like you are defending Johnson when he drives the lane for a lay-up a hundred times in a game.

“Having an Andy Roddick serve coming at you probably isn’t that fun — you wouldn’t even be able to see it most of the time,” Wilson said. “The idea is not to ever face something as dynamic or ominous as an Andy Roddick serve, but give you something that feels like an Andy Roddick serve.”

Sports games are a main source of revenue for Electronic Arts, so a lot of the innovation in terms of graphics and realistic physics happens in that department and trickles down to other games, said David Tinson, director of relations for EA Sports. Electronic Arts, for example, uses the collision engines originally built for Madden in games like Battlefield 3, Wilson said. Each year, those teams build and re-build physics and animation engines for their in-game characters, and then other games reap the rewards of those engines.

“Physics and animation in our very core games has been driven by sports games since the inception of the technology,” Wilson said. “That physics and animation had to be in a sports game, for many years shooters didn’t need it.”

The same goes for artificial intelligence. Shooters are becoming more realistic so it becomes more important that non-playable characters start making decisions like normal human beings. That started with games like Fifa, where the company had to design artificial intelligence that would make 22 players on a pitch behave like real human beings and make realistic decisions, Tinson said.

Those teams also pioneered the “once-a-year” cycle that many companies like Activision-Blizzard now employ in their largest franchises, Tinson said. The teams spend longer than a year working on the game, and they rotate as to which year to release games. For example, Call of Duty: Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3 are both Call of Duty games released one year apart, but they both had development cycles longer than one year. Activision-Blizzard is able to do this because they have multiple Call of Duty teams.

Again, these video games aren’t supposed to exactly replicate the act of watching a real sports game or going out and playing a real sport. I’ve added videos below of one of the greatest moments in basketball history, including both the real thing and a representation of it in a video game. It’s not the same thing, but the video game does a great job of capturing the emotion and feeling of that game. For video gamers, that makes it a window into an important piece of sports history.

So, to the folks I pissed off a little while ago: I’m not saying you have to start liking sports games. But realize what they contribute to the industry. It isn’t simply Football Roster Update 2012 or Next Sports Game 2012 — they are new games, just like every other genre. And they bring something new to the table, too.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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The Highland Park, Ill.-based company is announcing GameSlam today in public beta form for fans who want to bet against their friends (with virtual currency, not real money) and predict what’s going to happen next in the play-by-play.

“It lets you do something during the game so it’s no longer a passive experience,” said Kenny Mazursky (pictured below, left), chief marketing officer of the company, in an interview.

In an online arena of 100 fans, users get 10,000 points to bet during a real-time (live) baseball broadcast. The fans could wager 100 points that the next pitch will be a strike or a ball. Or they could make a bet about whether a team will score a run in the inning. Or they could make a wager about who will win the game. As the game proceeds, they are awarded points for staying with the game. If they bet everything and lose it, they can still stay in the action by earning new points gradually.

You can play the free-to-play game on an iPhone in a sports bar or on a laptop in your living room accessing Facebook or a web site. The game works on Apple’s iOS devices, Android, Macs, PCs web sites, and Facebook. For no charge, you can play with 100 random people or invite a group of friends into a big room. If you want to have a private experience with only your friends, you have to pay extra.

The company says there are more than 80 million baseball fans watching games on TV. But only about 30 million are serious enough to join fantasy baseball leagues, where they painstakingly keep track of players and scores. With GameSlam, getting into a game is easy. And since you don’t have to bet on every single pitch, it’s not as stressful as real-time fantasy sports games.

As fans watch TV, they check stats online, play an app, or update their status on TV. But they’re not doing something that is completely tied into the action on the screen. GameSlam basically channels your otherwise distracted attention right back into the game, said David Domm (pictured right), co-founder and chief operating officer/chief financial officer, in an interview.

GameSlam immediately updates the score of the game and the outcome of your bets. It also shows a 3D animation of what happened with the play in real time. That animation isn’t extremely realistic; it doesn’t for instance, have the likenesses of the players. But it will show you what happened and where a ball was hit.

Over time, GameSlam will start tournaments and give players rewards for winning the most points, said Kenny Mazursky, who co-founded the company with his father Rick Mazursky (chief executive) last year. The Mazurskys came up with the idea as they were discussing the popularity of fantasy sports and how that didn’t jibe with the fact that sports fans can’t interact during game time, which is the most exciting time to play.

The game has chat functions, league creation, check-in, head-to-head challenges and other features. The 3D animation uses the Unity 3D engine so that the company can create versions of the game that run on multiple platforms. The real-time game stats come from Stats LLC, which delivers the stats instantaneously, roughly in time with the slightly delayed cable broadcasts. The goal is to offer fans a console-like game experience.

Game Time Live Sports Services has 20 employees and has raised $5 million. Rivals include Thump and Pre Play Sports. Kenny Mazursky said the company is talking to a number of large broadcast networks and leagues about possible partnerships. Rick Mazursky is a seasoned entrepreneur with leadership positions at companies such as Vtech, Digital Innovations, G.P. Toys, and PDQ Mazoo and a board position with Leap Frog Enterprises. Kenny Mazursky is a 13-year veteran of internet marketing companies such as Rollingstone.com, Ignite Sports Media, and Down to Earth Marketing.

Calling all mobile executives: This April 25-26, VentureBeat is hosting its inaugural VentureBeat Mobile Summit, where we’ll debate the five key business and policy challenges facing the mobile industry today. Participants will develop concrete, actionable solutions that will shape the future of the mobile industry. The invitation-only event, located at the scenic and relaxing Cavallo Point Resort in Sausalito, Calif., is limited to 180 mobile executives, investors and policymakers. We’ve pretty much finalized the invite list, but have a few spots left. Request an invitation.

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GamesBeat 2013 is our fifth annual conference on disruption in the video game market. You'll get 360-degree perspectives from top gaming executives, developers, and analysts on what’s to come in the industry. Our theme this year is “The Battle Royal.” Check out full event details here, and grab your early-bird tickets here!

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