Not quite soul-crushing, but a very disappointing game and a disheartening direction for a promising franchise.
It's not the 360's fault that MLB2K6 sucks, though - it's the developers. The game is clearly not ready for prime-time. Where to begin:
-- The ugliest graphics I've ever seen on the 360. I only have a 27" standard television, but everything else I've played has managed to look amazing. MLB, on the other hand, looks downright terrible - it looks arguably worse than 2K5 for the Xbox1. The animations are stiff and jerky, the depth-of-focus trick is overused (and yet somehow not even used correctly), the stadiums don't really look that great compared to games past... I will admit to being a graphics whore but I don't necessarily need amazing graphics to appreciate a baseball game; however, the graphics here just plain SUCK and it ruined the experience.
-- The console-freezing bug. Totally unacceptable. It finally happened to me after 3 or 4 games, by which point I already knew I was going to trade it in - it wasn't the last straw, but more like the final nail in the coffin.
-- 5 achievements? 5? Most of which could conceivably be done in one game against the Royals? Considering that each game starts with 4 mini-contests... there is no rational explanation. Part of what makes baseball so appealing to the non-athelically inclined is all the number-crunching and statistical analysis that goes on for pretty much every pitch. Baseball, more than any other sport, lives and dies by its numbers. 5 achievements, then, is an insult. It's almost as if some intern was given 10 seconds to come up with some achievement ideas, and then the napkin that list was written on was misplaced, and then everyone forgot about it, and then the game was about to come out, and a janitor found the napkin in the trash and said "do you guys need this", and the SVP of Marketing said "YES we've been looking for that" and then just threw it in there. Here's the thing - I am an achievement whore, too, and this looks like the easiest way to score 1000 points out of everything in the 360 library, but I'd rather set myself on fire than try to muck my way through this game.
-- Speaking of muck - the game just feels as if it were slodging through it. The new pitching interface doesn't really do anything for me, the new hitting interface feels totally awkward, the outfielders are either drunk or retarded which generally turns a single into a stand-up triple... and what's really insulting is that I'm good at this game. At least, I was in the previous entries; for whatever reason I was completely hopeless at controlling this game. Here's the thing - controls for a sports game need to be (a) intuitive and (b) easy to control. And if it's a long-running franchise, a bit of (c) familiarity goes a long way.
-- If you're going to overhaul your controls just to say you overhauled them, you're stupid and your game sucks.
++ The ONLY positive thing I can say about this game is that the announcing team of Jon Miller and Joe Morgan are as fantastic as ever. I hate Joe Morgan in real life, but it's part of the Jon Miller package, and Jon Miller is one of the best baseball announcers in the history of broadcasting. Now that EA has scooped up the ESPN license, I wonder if they'll ever return to the 2KSports booth...
In sum, MLB2K6 for the 360 is a rushed, sloppy half-hearted port with a terrible graphical "upgrade". I hate EA as much as anybody, but when 2KSports beat them at their own game by seizing the "exclusive" rights to the MLB franchise, I was both excited and a bit nervous, as I wasn't sure how 2KSports would react to being the only major player in the console game. Would they be complacent? Would they innovate? As it turns out, it appears that they overslept. I'll give them a mulligan on this one, but they will feel my wrath if 2K7 is even half as crappy as 2K6.