Okay, MLB 07 The Show, a new baseball game. Every year, a new baseball game, which makes "new baseball game" something of an oxymoron. A game in which you play a game of baseball in 2007. Hard to sound original. Fortunately, MLB 07 does, in fact, offer something new, which also happens to be something worth talking about and something worth considering when you're thinking of buying your umpteenth "new" baseball game.

In what's best described as an innovative innovation (as opposed to a phoned-in innovation, like "create-a-logo" or something similarly lame but touted as "new" or, worse, "innovative"), a new pitching system has been introduced in MLB 07. "Adaptive Pitching Intelligence" (API) has the A.I. catcher taking into account the score of the game, runners on base, who's batting for the opposition and what pitches you're throwing best, and then making a calculated suggestion as to what to throw next and where. Of course, you can ignore the suggestion and throw whatever pitch you want to, but if you're predictable, the opposing team's A.I. will pick up on that, too, and you'll get knocked around the yard.

Also new is a "Pitch Command System" (PCS) which ranks a pitcher's arsenal of pitches from best to worst along with a new confidence meter that shows how much faith that pitcher has with any particular pitch. Get a lot of strikes with fastball and watch the confidence meter go up and the pitches get even better; get blasted with the curve ball and watch the confidence sink and that curve ball go perfectly straight. Keep working that lousy curve and your pitcher just might get his groove back.

Another cool touch-up is found in the new career mode, called "Road to the Show" (roughly the baseball equivalent to Madden's "Superstar" mode) where you create a player and experience life in the game from that player's point-of-view only.

You're not the manager in this case; you can't control any other player on the field or at bat. In it, you're given specific in-game tasks to perform in order to gain points to improve your player. You could be asked to turn a double play, for example, or advance the runner to the next base. The more you succeed, the better you will get. Pretty cool.

Online mode is where MLB 07 The Show really shines, boasting online leagues of up to 30 teams, complete with leaderboards, stats rankings and enough numbers warp even the most Beautiful mind (or un-warp, to use the Beautiful Mind metaphor more aptly). Online you can also keep up-to-date rosters and track of your favourite real-life team on an MLB ticker at the bottom of the screen.

The only real noteworthy flaw of MLB 07 is found in the camera angles, views which range from wonky to out-of-whack -- it can get disorientating enough that you'll have no clue as to what's happening, which doesn't occur all that often, just sometimes, but often enough to be frustrating.

While anyone can talk the "new and innovative in-game advancements" talk, MLB 07 The Show actually walks that talk and proves that a few minor tweaks here and there along with a better career mode and more "realistic," baseballish features makes for a better game, a "new" take on the old peanuts and Crackerjacks standby. And everyone can dig that.