Out Of The Park Baseball 5

Details: Category: Computer; By Cheryl Gress; 01.Jun; Hits: 8016

OOTP5

Developer Markus Heinsohn may have created the definitive text based baseball simulation with the newest release of OOTP. Caveat empttor: this game is NOT for the casual sports gamer. There is a plethora of options and the statistics and ratings - combined with in depth badeball strategy that would have made old time manager John McGraw happy - are truly staggering and could well put off the casual gamer looking for a quick baseball fix
That said, OOTP5 offers immense value for money. You can choose to play the most recent MLB season, have the computer generate a league with fictional players, or, and in my opinion the BEST news of all, by downloading the FREE Sean Lahman Baseball Archive database, you can create ANY Major League Baseball season from 1876 to the present. When you compare this feature alone to other text based sims such as Strat-O-Matic, Dynasty League, Diamond Mind Baseball which sell seperate historical season disks it is already apparent that you are getting a huge amount for your gaming dollar!

The historical season replay also offers a groundbreaking feature: you can actually create and play a league that will progress through the years - again using real players. So, for example, you could start by importing the stas for the great 1908 seasons - which by the way has had books and scads of articles written about it - play the season and post-season, and then lo and behold... you go right into 1909 complete with the proper rookies on the proper teams!! Yes!! The baseball fanatic could conceivably replay the ENTIRE HISTORY of the National Pastime!!

AI

The AI is strong, there is a sound financial model, user created skins, themes, roster sets, and ballparks. Traditional and sabermetric stats round out this great sim.

Graphics

The graphics are sharp and it is great fun to watch the out of town scoreboard relate information about games elsewhere happening concurrently. Sound is implemeted in this fifth incarnation with an intelligent crowd similar to that found in the now defunct Miller Associates Baseball for Windows.

Markus and his team are well known for their customer support. Constant enhancements and patches insure the gamer that this product is guaranteed to be THE sim of choice for the SERIOUS baseball fan.