At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is starting to change. Our colleague Bret Begun, recently named NEWSWEEK's senior editor for national affairs, is an admitted lapsed gamer who's come out of his self-imposed retirement to post on Level Up from time to time about sports games. Begun, who has previously written about the World Series and the Olympics for the print magazine, debuts here with a brief look at the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Take-Two/2K Sports' forthcoming baseball game, MLB 2K7.

Baseball Stars, a 1989 Nintendo game that allowed you the then-revolutionary ability to keep a player's stats intact, was the last video game I played regularly. MLB 2K7, which I demoed Monday afternoon, is ever-so-slightly more advanced than Baseball Stars--and, for that matter, last year's MLB 2K6. This year, there's real-time lighting, realistic dirt particles, bat boys and hecklers. But the primary upgrade is "signature-style animation" for about 150 top players. So when Curt Schilling threw a pitch inside to Derek Jeter, Jeter did "the Jeter jerk," which is how Anthony Chau, a 2K Sports rep, described Jeter's jack-knife theatrics. Having watched Jeter perform this charade countless times, I can say that the game's depiction is dead-on. 2K's got A-Rod down, too: I expected him to strike out with a man on--and he did.