Baseball Mogul was my sim of choice until the licensing wars were decided and then, hey. 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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