One of the most prestigious honors I can bestow on any game is designating it a Disc That's Never More Than Five Feet Away From My TV at Any Time. (Colloquially known as the DTNMTFFAFMTVAAT Award.)

The Bigs, oddly enough, was one of those discs.

The game was the perfect late-night, just-getting-in, don't-want-to-think-too-much, I've-had-too-many-beers experience. It was always just challenging enough to make me feel like I was doing something interesting and, ideally, exciting. Unlike other sports games, I didn't have to monkey around with rosters or worry about draft days, or how much I'd charge for the average seat in the upper deck. It was pure. It was baseball sans the bullshit. Unlike other sports games, I could load up the game and instantly get a tangible payoff.

If you get a ball by Jeter, e-mail me, and tell me what that feels like in great detail. I'd like to know.

I logged so many hours with The Bigs that I'm surprised the disc didn't move out to a nearby hotel and get a restraining order against me. I really put that thing through the mill.

Aside from my friend John in Boston (hi, John), I knew of no one who played the original game. Which is why I was slack-jawed when 2K announced -- surprise! -- a few months back that a sequel was in the works. Hell, they even took Teti and me out to a Mets game and demoed The Bigs 2 for us there -- in what was one of the greatest days of my life.

Ever since, I've been playing The Bigs 2 in various alpha and beta incarnations over the past few months. A few days ago, I got my hands on the final boxed version. (They've got the Brewers' Prince Fielder on the box cover. Nice. I like Fielder. He's one of those professional athletes who's clearly comfortable with his potbelly.)

That ball is gone, son. And it's never a-coming back again.

The heart of any baseball videogame, the core of the drama, is what happens between the batter and the pitcher. The Bigs had probably the cleanest batter-pitcher battles in gaming history. And The Bigs 2 preserves that tradition. Getting a pitch by a batter, or taking a ball at plate, gives your team a couple of squares of Turbo.

It's this simple rule -- this constantly see-sawing quest for Turbo -- that forces pitchers to throw strikes, and forces batters to swing the bat. The result: Sh*t happens constantly. Full counts? They don't exist in the game. The pitcher challenges the hitter; the hitter challenges the pitcher. The game moves along with a great deal of alacrity. Everybody is happy.

Collisions at the plate are detrimental to any expensive dental work you might have had done.

2K includes a new "Wheelhouse" dynamic in The Bigs 2. Each batter has a Wheelhouse: a hot zone at the plate that typically results in a moon shot, should the batter connect with a pitch there. The Wheelhouse is represented as a pulsing red area within the strike zone, and its size is proportional to the skill of the batter. Ichiro's strike zone, for example, is pretty much one big, red, pulsating zone. You'll have to paint the corners, as they say, to get anything by him.

The pitcher, if he's feeling lucky, can challenge the batter by throwing directly into the Wheelhouse. If he gets one by him, the risk is worthy of a x3 multiplier on whatever Turbo the pitcher earns. And he'll cause the Wheelhouse/hot zone to shrink by about half. But throwing there is a dangerous business. I've tried it. Most of the time, the ball winds up getting rocketed over the fence. Home run.

Another tweak new to The Bigs 2: the advent of the Big Slam. In the previous game, once you'd earned 100,000 Turbo points, you were able to activate Big Heat on the mound (the screen would change to a dramatic black-and-white color scheme, the music would cut out, and you were basically guaranteed a strikeout) or, at the plate, a Big Blast (a guaranteed dinger, usually off one of the foul poles).

You earned it, pal. Now go to the hotel bar and get your load on then go back to your room with a couple of ladyfriends. Yes, welcome to the bigs!

The Bigs 2 features the Big Slam. Accrue enough Turbo points, and you'll get four quickie pitches. Hit the first three to load the bases, then hit the fourth to clear the bases. In other words: instant grand slam.

Pulling one of these off is terribly gratifying. They almost always happen in the late innings, and they're obviously game-changers. Certain defeat becomes certain victory. A rout can suddenly become, to use MLB vernacular, a "laugher." But having the artificial intelligence pull off a Big Slam on you -- and it will, trust me -- is absolutely soul-crushing. So I have mixed feelings about the Big Slam. I like it as a concept, but often the result was a lopsided game that felt either too easy or too unfair.

Speaking of unfair, The Bigs 2 also allows All-Star players to make Legendary Catches. Derek Jeter, for example, basically is able to cover the entire square footage of the borough of The Bronx with his Legendary Catch ability. Good luck hitting anything by him. Any outfielder or infielder with All-Star/Legendary status will field balls like starving, bionic rhesus monkeys snatching ripe bananas out of the air. It's fun to see, unless you've just stroked a line drive up the middle in the bottom of the fifth (the final inning in The Bigs), which most certainly would have gotten your teammate on third base home and won the game, only to be treated to a painfully slow-motion, flash-bulbs-popping shot of Jeter snatching certain victory away from you.

This is not going to end well.

Shouts of "COME ON" (bless you, "Arrested Development") rang out in my apartment over and over again. These Legendary abilities are a nice idea. But in practice, they wind up making me feel like I have even less control over the outcome of the games. They make me feel like the overaggressive, perfectionist AI is having far more fun than I am. And that's a problem.

I honestly could give a rat's ass about the full-on Season mode, which features all 162 games of the actual MLB season and includes stat tracking. If I wanted a full season mode, I wouldn't be playing this game. I'd be playing Major League Baseball 2K9 or MLB 09: The Show. I play The Bigs for the quickie, get-in-get-out, extremely lean five innings of strike-him-out-swing-for-the-moon baseball.

There are some nice touches here. Each stadium has been recreated with an almost fetishistic attention to detail. You can choose your batter's walk-up music (though being able to import your own music would be nicer). I also love the fact that "Become a Legend" mode has you starting your rehab stint in some fly-blown Mexican league. Even the ump calls balls and strikes en Español. Nice.

Overall, The Bigs 2 is a sound sports game that's been tweaked a bit in some good ways, some unnecessary ways, and some bad ways. The bigger question is, will it earn the extremely rare Disc That's Never More Than Five Feet Away From My TV at Any Time Award? It'll take a few late-night litmus tests before I'll know for sure.

This review is based on a retail copy of the Xbox 360 game provided by the publisher.