Baseball Mogul was my sim of choice until the licensing wars were decided and then, hey.
OOTP BASEBALL 1B NOT HOLDING RUNNER LICENSE
What This Game Does Better Than The Rest: For awhile control of this genre was a two-horse race between OOTP Baseball and Baseball Mogul until-stop me if you’ve heard this one before-MLB put their thumb on the scales by making their license exclusive, and OOTP Baseball won that particular fight. I liked it better a few years ago they tried to modernize it a little bit and now it’s got weird camera clipping/reset issues with the little fielder guys when a play happens. There’s also a field-level single-game simulation module that…well, it tries. For the rest of us, this means a lot of the gameplay lies in screen management, and they’ve gotten better and better about how the UI/UX for that stuff works over the years. There’s actually a big old database under the hood that it’s pulling all the information from, such that sufficiently powerful tech sector nerds (which this game is already laser-targeted at) can probably do some neat stuff with DB calls once you get past the top level. How Does It Play?: Like a spreadsheet collator. Now that Out of the Park Baseball has some of those nice bells and whistles, it’s the industry-standard baseball management sim. There are a couple of different reasons for that, ranging from the banal and sensible-a management sim doesn’t rely on an expensive graphics engine or art team-to the more consequential, such as the fact that baseball as a sport is well suited to turn a player into the numerical sum of his contributions on the field, rather than a person. The broad tendency to make video games that aren’t about doing so much as they are about managing others that do and profiting, leech-like, off of them is something that currently extends far beyond baseball, but still finds something of its roots in board-games-played-online-through-spreadsheets like Strat O’Matic. Why OOTP?: Well, it is the game of our baseball age, isn’t it? Far more so than The Show, at least in my opinion. Genre: Management Simulation Management Simulation
So, Baseball Prospectus is going to write about, review, discuss, whatever the many, many baseball video games released in the last half-century that the genre has even existed. It can also be the game played on the virtual field.
Baseball is more than just the game played on the field.
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