Wasn't 2K sports the cheap sports game provider there for awhile? I don't really know since I really haven't been paying attention since the demise of Earl Weaver Baseball and Front Page Sports football.

Holy crap! It's Out of the Park Baseball with better graphics!

I think I'll wait until the price drops.

Put it on the iPhone, please.

I loved Earl Weaver, with that crazy code wheel. I used to hand input each season's stats every winter to prepare for baseball season.

Yeah; for 40 bucks I can get both Baseball Mogul and OOTP on Steam.

I'll pass/

Game Informer gave it a horrible review (two reviews, actually: 3 out of 10 and 5 out of 10). And the reviewer who gave the 3 out of 10 rating was clearly someone who was a big fan of the concept.

I loved Earl Weaver, with that crazy code wheel.

Yeah, I got the game pirated, so in order to play it, someone (I forget after all this time if it was me or the guy who gave it to me) had to photocopy every combination on the wheel. As I recall, the wheel had "stadiums" and "seat numbers". There had to have been 20 of each at the very least. Fun.

I used to hand input each season's stats every winter to prepare for baseball season.

I actually don't think I ever did that in EWB, but I made any number of historical and "all-time franchise" teams. I think I did do the last season's teams thing in Micro League Baseball.

Why didn't I get dates?

Front Page Sports: Baseball was underrated, IMO. Or at least, I never knew a lot of people who played it. I remember the year that shipped with it was 1994, the strike year, so maybe that had something to do with it. But I was in a net league for a few years, back when Usenet was king. It was quite advanced for its time in terms of franchise play, and it had a skills-based (as opposed to stat-based like Strat-O-Matic; i.e., guys were ranked for "curveball", "speed", etc.) system that worked very well.

Game Informer gave it a horrible review (two reviews, actually: 3 out of 10 and 5 out of 10). And the reviewer who gave the 3 out of 10 rating was clearly someone who was a big fan of the concept.

What were the complaints?

I'm a huge fan of Mogul, and I go back to Micro League Baseball on the Commodore 64.

Cannot wait until this comes out on the Wii, and I can actually be Theo Epstein and throw the chair.

I actually don't think I ever did that in EWB, but I made any number of historical and "all-time franchise" teams. I think I did do the last season's teams thing in Micro League Baseball.

A friend of mine and I created an "all-drug" team on MicroLeague in the late 80s. Raines, Parker, Hernandez, etc...I don't remember all the specifics of the team but it was REALLY good.

The other cool thing my buddy and I did was play a tournament with all the losing LCS teams from 80-87. The 87 Tigers wound up winning a 7 game series over the 81 Expos.

I'm assuming this is just another celebrity-driven knockoff of Journey: Escape.

Front Page Sports: Baseball was underrated, IMO. Or at least, I never knew a lot of people who played it.

I played this game like nuts. It was very well conceptualized and if they stuck with the format and improved it year after year, it would have ended up being a great game. One of the few to get the balance between arcade and front office sim and do a good job of it.

It had some awful quirks. How far you hit the ball was mostly determined by how fast the pitch was, so pitchers with great fastball ratings like John Wetteland were horrible. Changeups ruled the game. But best of all were the handful of starters that were given absolutely no fastball rating, who only threw offspeed stuff. Bobs Welch and Tewksbury could win 30 games in a season. And I threw a 10-inning perfect game with Randy Tomlin.

The sim was also terribly slow. I had a team that I followed maybe 12 years into the future - the player creation engine was messed up and no draftee with all-star ability was ever created. I suppose it would have been interesting to follow it another 10 years and see what happened when the game was entirely peopled with mediocre players.

There was no 95 edition and then Front Page Sports Baseball 96 was a disaster of a game - you would sim a month and when you checked your standings realize that your backup shortstop led the league in saves.

I started getting into Mogul but then discovered Football Manager (or WorldWide Soccer Manager) and can't seem to get back into any of the baseball games again. Anyone else play FM?

And I am reprinting a comment from a couple months ago in which I predicted this game would be bad:

It is difficult to bridge the gap between an arcade game, which will be fun on a console, and a staty game. As soon as I see the screen shot of the "Create your GM" function, in which points are allocated to things like scouting ability and contract negotations, as if you were creating a D&D;character, I know that they are doing a crappy job of it. That 50% of the screenshots on the company site are of the game-watching feature also isn't encouraging.

In general I think that GM Game people are attracted to the many layers of detail and customization that Out of the Park or Diamond Mind offers. From what I can tell, that isn't what these guys are going for. Which is why I think the final product will end up being a poor halfbreed - an arcade game that isn't that fun, and a sim game that isn't that interesting.

But even if they had a great plan, I tend to doubt anyone can get it right the first time. OOTP and Baseball Mogul are improved every year; the first version of each is probably a joke compared to the current product. The same with Championship/Football Manager, the incredible soccer sim. Even all of the games I loved from the past (Earl Weaver, Microleague, Tony LaRussa, Front Page Sports Baseball/Football) were just rife with flaws. The vibe I get from this game reminds me of Total Control Football, which was disastrously, hilariously bad.

Anyone else play FM?

Clearly the best sports simulation game ever, in my opinion. But I get frustrated because I can never win. In any baseball sim game it is easy to figure out ... um ... market inefficiencies. Usually the AI undervalues prospects, or there are easily available Ken Phelps types, or the draft is easy to crack, or you can unload 7 horrible players for one great one. And you figure out that Power is the only rating the matters for hitters, that Movement is the only rating that matters for pitchers, or something like that. And you start trying to see how quickly you can take the 120 loss team to the World Series, and it's usually 5 years. But I have never been able to crack Football Manager and my teams always do exactly as well as or slightly worse than they should. I can take AC Milan or Man U and load up on crazy transfers and the entire season is still a struggle.

A friend of mine and I created an "all-drug" team on MicroLeague in the late 80s. Raines, Parker, Hernandez, etc...I don't remember all the specifics of the team but it was REALLY good.

I once accidentally put in the wrong disk (a non-MicroLeague disk) when trying to bring up a team, and it treated it like a team disk which actually played, those teams we very interesting.

MicroLeague (only up to v2) was the best baseball game ever, especially with the GM/Owners disk you could create any team you wanted pretty easily. Unfortunately with most games back then you find a bug in the system that you can easily exploit, and you wind up with things like 1987 Harold Reynolds batting .522 with 125 stolen bases in half a season...

#11: Heh, yeah, and knuckleballers were even better than changeup guys, in my experience (assuming that, as you say, they had no fastball). The good thing was that, in another ahead-of-its-time thing, the game's internal settings were customizable. So people eventually made settings files that fixed the issues you describe... you just had to trawl all over the Web/Usenet to find them. Of course, I'm assuming that the 99.9% of people who buy a game and expect it to work, did not do this.

I'm sure it simmed ungodly slow by modern standards, but I think at the time, I figured that was as fast as it could go. Certainly not like current Baseball Mogul where you could sim 20 seasons in an hour if that's your thing ;-)

As soon as I see the screen shot of the "Create your GM" function, in which points are allocated to things like scouting ability and contract negotations, as if you were creating a D&D;character

Heh, this is how "spring training" worked in FPS:BB.

Unfortunately with most games back then you find a bug in the system that you can easily exploit, and you wind up with things like 1987 Harold Reynolds batting .522 with 125 stolen bases in half a season...

Huh, I didn't realize that. I mean, I could see the steals since that's managerial discretion, but my guys generally followed their hitting stats. Did you bunt every time? I never noticed bunting working a disproportionate amount, but that's my guess since as far as I can recall, it's the only managerial option you actually had :)

(Bunting DID work very well in Earl Weaver, or at least, the bunt-and-run was a devastating play. Guess they didn't consult Earl about that part.)

Heh, this is how "spring training" worked in FPS:BB.

Yes, it did! The same thing for Front Page Sports football. For kickers and punters you could ignore all other attributes - after 10 years your kickers would be essentially immobile but with 99 ratings in the only categories that mattered.

Also in FPS FB 95 Bruce Smith was so good that he reached beyond a sort of tipping point that made him able to block 50% of all punts, making him the most valuable player in the game.

It had some awful quirks.

FPS:BB was great. My fav pitcher was always Joey Hamilton who was fairly invincible, and batters like Eric Young who had good contact numbers and ran well could end up with outrageous numbers of doubles and steals. On the whole it was fun.

I also agree that most of these games have a couple simple fulcrums that allow you to romp once you figure them out. My way around it is to dial down the accuracy of my scouting so more luck comes into play.

Huh, I didn't realize that. I mean, I could see the steals since that's managerial discretion, but my guys generally followed their hitting stats. Did you bunt every time? I never noticed bunting working a disproportionate amount, but that's my guess since as far as I can recall, it's the only managerial option you actually had :)

You always stole with men on 1st and 3rd, you rarely ever got caught no matter who was on, and stole home a good amount... and a poor-hitting left handed hitter with speed would bunt for a hit nearly every time, and would steal a little better than they should. Didn't work as well if the batter could hit (oops, it was the '86, .222 hitting Reynolds)

I'm still waiting for someone to come up with the XP patch fix for FPS! I want it to run again, dammit.

I loved Earl Weaver, with that crazy code wheel. I used to hand input each season's stats every winter to prepare for baseball season.

Wow, you brought back some memories. I remember having to save the KC Star Sports section at the end of the season so I could have all final MLB stats on hand to plug in Earl Weaver Baseball that winter. My friends and I would play series and keep stats, and even make our own ballparks with ridiculous dimensions (I remember we had a "Circus Maximus" that had the furthest walls you could have and I don't think we had a single home run in a seven game series, but triples, triples, and triples galore!)

I kept playing seasons on that game well into law school, except I had to keep playing it on this old tiny computer that was about 20 years obsolete and my roomate would always ask why I kept that old computer around.

Do you think it mattered what pitches you chose to throw in Micro League? I could never decide that. There was no place to specify how good a pitcher was at each pitch, which would suggest that it didn't matter which one you used. But it did feel like it made a difference. On the other hand, it would probably be human nature to think it made a difference, even if it didn't.

What were the complaints?

Broken UI and a stupid AI.

If you could design a baseball sim game, what would you include that you have not seen in a sim game?

Do you think it mattered what pitches you chose to throw in Micro League? I could never decide that.

I never figured that out, but it seemed like if you favored a certain pitch they would start to hit that, so I always went 4-3-2-1 (I think those were the pitch numbers) no matter who the pitcher was.

OOTP is still the king, especially for online league play.

And you figure out that Power is the only rating the matters for hitters, that Movement is the only rating that matters for pitchers, or something like that.

For OOTP, Contact is the big thing for hitters (Power is second) and Stuff/Movement are most important for pitchers with Control lagging behind.

I played a ton on Tony Larussa baseball 3, back in the day. While you could play out games, they also had a career mode where you could only be the GM. There was a bunch of 3rd party utilities which added lots of cool stuff (trading blocks, shop player around, etc.). We even had some online leagues.

I then switched to Mogul, then OOTP.

I was mainly interested that Billy Beane put his name on the product and is included as an advisor in the game play. I do not endorse the product or work for the company.

Fans of these types of games NOT playing What If Sports' "Hardball Dynasty" are really mssing out on a fantastic game.

I was in an online FPS league for a few years (blurbed in Entertainment Weekly - they gave us a B+), while house rules lessened some issues (like ST allocations), we experienced all the problems mentioned above (post 11).
I suppose it would have been interesting to follow it another 10 years and see what happened when the game was entirely peopled with mediocre players.
More balanced/realistic stats, excepting a few studly oldsters (IIRC, Sean Bergman was a perennial CYA candidate).

OOTP is the best baseball sim I've played, but I got too futzy about the lack of realism/ease of beating the AI by the time I started playing it. If my kids were older, I'd give it another try.

Never found a good NBA sim, but I liked the Gary Gorski college ones...

I loved FPS and played it forever. For my team Carl Pavano and Essex Burton were absolute monsters, true HOF/HOM studs. Why did they stop producing the game, and more imporantly is there a similar game around today? I'm not interested in just watching stats scroll across the screen, but I don't want an arcade game either.

XP patch fix for FPS

Just get something like Dosbox and you can play FPS now. I'm trapped in my youth. I rarely buy or play any of the new games. I think the most recent game I play is from 8 years ago and most of the games I play are usually 15 years old or older or are based on board games (axis and allies) from the 80's. The level of micromanagement needed in most games nowadays goes well beyond my level of attention or time I wish to spend on tedious things.

As for FPS football I always played as the Bills and would simply dominate. Like others after a few years of summer camp and trade the team was simply unstoppable. I remember when they updated the graphics and started recommending one of those "powerful" 1 meg video cards. If I didn't turn off all the bells and whistles the game got incredibly slow.

Looking it up on Wiki I had no idea there were so many versions. I guess after they didn't release a 1994 I assumed they had stopped.

I'll echo the Gorski College Basketball Game. Its been fun when I get a chance to play.

Bunting with fast players worked like a charm in Micro League Baseball.

"A booming fly ball..."

I used to play entire seasons on EWB that I hand-entered. I would pick a year and enter all the stats, then sim the entire season. Then, I would use those sim-stats for the following year while supplementing it with new debuts.

Now, I'm catching the OOTP bug after years with Diamond Mind.

Edit to add: I tried Hardball Dynasty and hated, hated, hated it. Too many wacky stat lines and unrealistic environments.

Love Hardball Dynasty!!! Not clear what's to hate. BPPG?

If you could design a baseball sim game, what would you include that you have not seen in a sim game?

Jpeg avatars of the Baseball Prospectus honchos, The Transaction Oracle, Billy Beane, and Bill James, with appropriate AI. I want to see the pores and feel their analyses!

I never figured that out, but it seemed like if you favored a certain pitch they would start to hit that, so I always went 4-3-2-1 (I think those were the pitch numbers) no matter who the pitcher was.

Clearly further research is needed. Now if only my computer had a floppy drive that could accept 5.25" Microleague season disks. Where's my grant money?

I haven't seen too many crazy player stats in Mogul so far unless I play with the dimensions of the ballpark, but I did find some fun ways to break the game, and I always seem to have an edge in salary negotiations.

The main problem I have with the game is that it's a little too easy to lock up superstar players for ridiculously low salaries, and taking into account park factors (which the players' agents don't do) tilts things in my favor. As an extreme example, I made a new version of Busch Stadium that played about like a little league park. As a result, my pitching staff had an ERA over 7.00, and even my crummy hitters got to 30-40 HR with little difficulty. So, I'd sell/trade/drop the hitters (except for guys like Pujols and Colby Rasmus), and I'd let the ballpark ruin the stat lines of top pitchers so I could sign them for $2 million per year or less.

One thing I really like about the game is that Colby Rasmus is a god.


I recently made an entire league of fictional teams, and I am playing GM for all of them. That has been tremendously fun, though I find myself tempted to try to get other people to play in a league where I am the commissioner. That might be even more fun.


My fondest video game baseball memories are of FPS BB, but those might be at least partially the product of nostalgia.

I go back to Micro League Baseball on the Commodore 64

Had my first triumph of employing Jamesian knowledge in a Micro League League. Some guys at work held a draft without knowing of my geekdom. When I found out, I told them, look if I make a team with leftover players, you'll have an 8-team league and it'll run better. Put together my team and came in 3rd, well above .500, and was told I was lucky.

The funniest part of FPS:BB was the injuries.
There was a ridiculous number of injuries on close plays at 1st base.
My friend and I ran a team on his computer, and we saw our star CF go down because he got beaned by a throw to first and was out for the season. Oh well, bad luck. The NEXT BATTER bunted, and when the throw went to 1B, the fielder got injured (broken arm).

Any time we saw a misplay in the field, it came up with an injury 25% of the time.

But damn, we had some serious fun with that game.

Pure Baseball is the best sim out there if you want to have all the GM and manager functions and compete against real people instead of a computer AI. Drafting, trading, roster management and then an excellent sim with accurate park effects. A 160 game season with playoffs and year-round trading.

http://gamesite.purebaseball.com

For my money OOTP is the top text based baseball sim.

If you want a game you can actually play and which also has realistic stats, drafting, and actually feels like baseball go with High Heat Baseball 2003/04. It plays like baseball, drafts like baseball (I've drafted guys in the 18th round who've become all-stars and had more than my fair share of top picks die in AAA), and has actual natural era shifts. My bro and I each had our own leagues and mine stayed at late 90's power levels while his, over the course of 10 seasons, shifted into a 1980s offensive environment. I tried playing the new MVP games but would always go back to High Heat as it's players, minus career blip years, generally stayed realistic.

If you guys want a basketball sim check out Jump Shot basketball and World Basketball Manager. Jump Shot is no longer being made but you can find all the historical seasons out there and it can actually be a pain to manage the cap (mid-level salary exemption is included in the game). The trading and drafting AI is actually pretty good at managing their teams so not a walk it's not a walk in the park. World Basketball Manager is much more like Football Manager where it has all the world leagues but has no NCAA so the NBA league feels undercooked.

Other sim games to check out are Eastside Hockey Manager 2007 which is the hockey version of Football Manager and has since been discontinued by SI Games and also Front Office Football manager which can be a damn hard nut to beat. I've had friends play it and give up because they just can't beat the AI whereas I love it. All these games have dedicated modders out there so you can find historical seasons and have rosters updated every year.

I'm also a little surprised by how much you guys love Earl Weaver and Microleague. I tried playing those games when I was younger but always found Tony Larussa Baseball to be much more fun. I still have a soft spot for Tony Larussa and some of the old games I grew up with (like Major League Baseball and LEgends of the Diamond) but by the time Baseball Mogul and OOTP came out, not too mention High Heat, they all kind of blew those games out of the water in terms of graphics, realism, and AI. I can't recommend OOTP and High Heat enough as games.

ps. I'm a video game and sim junkie so have lost far too many nights to all these games.

The sim was also terribly slow. I had a team that I followed maybe 12 years into the future - the player creation engine was messed up and no draftee with all-star ability was ever created. I suppose it would have been interesting to follow it another 10 years and see what happened when the game was entirely peopled with mediocre players.

I used to play a shareware English soccer sim called "Soccer Management Simulator" that had the same problem. There was a bug that meant that none of the new players ever improved, and almost all of them were extremely slow. So the strategy in the game was always to get the best (real) young players you could in the first season, and then hold on to them until they retired. Eventually all of the top scorers would be 40-year-olds, and then once they'd retired you'd start having seasons in which all of the teams were essentially equal, so someone like Torquay United might win the FA Cup out of the Third Division.

Billy Beane should have never written that computer game…

Actually, Beane (and Brian Cashman) consulted on the project. And apparently Beane's likeness is used in the game as an adviser.

Haven't played it yet, but I'm not surprised that it's a lemon. My guess is that next year's version will feature a much better AI and realistic game engine. Most text sims seem to take a few revisions until they're worth playing (except for Mogul, which actually got increasingly worse for a time before improving). If 2k can improve the game engine, then the graphics will give it a clear advantage over OOTP.

Huge huge fan of FPS:BB. In fact, still in an online league that uses it.

For my money though, OOTP puts it to shame. Absolutely love it. It does everything I ever wanted FPS to do, and does it better. I created a league of fictional players starting in 1900, gone through some expansion, created uniforms and logos; great fun. The only weakness is trading AI, you can still work out some one-sided deals, but not nearly as bad as in other baseball sims.

Also enjoyed Eastside Hockey Manager, and wished they were able to keep it going, get through a few more versions and perfect it. Wasn't meant to be.

Gary Gorski has a good pro basketball sim, and his college game is good as well. But you wanna talk about programming issues ... they should have named those games Run-Time Error Basketball.

Whenever I play one of those games after a long break I immediately think "Why in the world did I put this game away?" A handful of shutdowns and lost stats later I remember why I gave up on it. Too bad because the games are visually pleasing and reasonably accurate.

It makes me feel so less old reading the MicroLeague on the Commodore 64 stories - an actual stats compiler?

Heaven.

A couple buddies and I would dump a box of baseball cards out, draft teams, and play 162 game seasons.

It did have a few bugs, though -- LH batters had a 95% success rate on drag bunts -- we had to ban the play.

OOTP is definitely the king - I still don't think I've found the "perfect" 4X strategy game or historical sim, but I see no need to ever purchase another baseball sim. Even though I still think I prefer the old OOTP6.5 and previous interfaces, I still plunk down the cash for every release and expansion, sight unseen.

Jpeg avatars of the Baseball Prospectus honchos, The Transaction Oracle, Billy Beane, and Bill James, with appropriate AI. I want to see the pores and feel their analyses!

You can actually customize OOTP to do something like this, but it's a lot of work to write all the HTML, make a few swaps here and there, and then download/resize jpegs just so you can get a snarky news story accompanied by a jpeg of toast in the transactions news report when Roberto Alomar gets released... now if they could integrate Dan, we might be on to something.

I found the flaw in FPS Football was trading for draft picks. You could usually deal a mediocre starter on your team for 1-2 1st round picks, usually to the worst team in the league. After a few years of that you had stars at almost every position.

For Baseball Mogul, I would sign young players to 7 year contracts, and give them a 3 year $50 million player option. Then I would either deal them before the option kicked in (a la poison pill), or just renegotiate another 7 year deal. My best Mogul story was about a year ago, when out of desperation I picked up Jim Edmonds off the waiver wire. He hit the tar off the ball for about a month, and then I resigned him and he played a season as a 4th outfielded, 400 ABs, about 30 HRs. And then again. Eventually, he was about 41, I had to pay him $18 million to keep him from retiring, and he could only play CF - and he was rated as a 60 there. Good fun. He eventually just retired mid season and went onto the HOF.

Another Micro League Baseball bug was hitting and running with a high strikeout guy at the plate. It drastically reduced how often he struck out, and for the Canseco and Rob Deer types it made them absolute monsters.

I generally found no difference in results based on what pitch I selected though.

I like OOTP, but as an obsessive trader, I find that you can build up a huge talent disparity over time.

I wish I could get Tony LaRussa II to work on my laptop. Playing a league entirely of retired players was fun, and creating players was so, so easy.

You should be able to get it to work with a program like dosbox

So, was this game any good?

OOTP is the best. I hear the new version can accurately handle mid-19th century baseball with scores like 20-14.

Baseball Mogul is what I play, however. It's easier--not so much in terms of beating the AI as in not taking such a mammoth time commitment. Simpler.

Too bad I missed this thread a year ago. I started microleague in 1987. We had to have some kind of gentleman's rules to limit the sac bunts. Most pichere mixed their pitches but we occasionally had one who was supposed to be too dumb and too macho to throw anything besides fastballs. He'd generally get rocked.

Anyone ever have a situation where in the middle of the game, all the players on both sides run to the left field seats, and you get an error message something like "xzyzxy doesn't work". You lost the game but it would reboot, we figured xyzxyz was the name of the player's union.

Does anyone still play Diamond Mind, or has the whole Dayne Myers/Imagine Sports clusterfrick sent the game into an unrecoverable death spiral?

xzyzxy is the "Derek Bell" cheat code

Does anyone still play Diamond Mind, or has the whole Dayne Myers/Imagine Sports clusterfrick sent the game into an unrecoverable death spiral?

We're trying to start a league that was supposed to start with Version 10 (due out in January!) but the clusterfrick as you so adequately describe it has us on hold. It is rather frustrating because going through the draft was fun (well, until I saw I had put together a ground ball staff and a great defensive...outfield).

The problem I had on MicroLeague was about 40% of the time if I tried a steal with men on 1st and 3rd the game would lock up. Not sure what was worse, how pissed I would get or that I was dumb enough to keep doing it.

Can you start the league with 9c then upgrade to v10 when/if they ever release it?

I've done a fair amount of real-life starting lineup entry for older seasons, but held off on some of the early 70's seasons when DMB told me their release was imminent. That was at least 6 months ago.

In the meantime, a couple of other guys and I are putting our heads together to keep producing homebrew seasons going forward if they do close up shop.... as long as there's a demand for it.

Yeah, there are still Diamond Mind leagues out there - wish I'd been paying attention when the Primate edition was forming!

If there is really a full-featured API included with Version 10 (assuming it comes out soon), that will go a long long ways towards keeping it afloat, since there are plenty of users who would be happy to contribute league tools and other ways of making the user experience a whole lot better if the whole database and sim engine weren't completely locked away. We'll see how far the API actually goes, though.

And I'll admit to occasionally harboring the hope that, once v10 is out and working, ImagineSports will go under so we can all switch to homebrewed season disks and not keep throwing $30/year at Dayne...

OOTP guys: is the sim accuracy anywhere near DMB? That's the single most important thing for me; I want a statistics-based game, and I want it to model reality as accurately as possible. The last time I tried OOTP (which was a while ago, I admit), it wasn't really, well, in the same ballpark. [/groan]

#53: Tony 2 works great in Dosbox. It's a free dos emulator that you can get from Source Forge.

I've played OOTP Baseball more than all other computer games combined. Buying it was a fantastic decision--to the point where I feel it's given me a substantially better understanding of real MLB front office decisions.

My .02.

So, was this game any good?

To answer this question directly, no. It was terrible.

[56] I've tried Baseball Mogul, and it's fun, but I can't stand all the injuries. It's like every team, every season is the 2009 Mets. (I could swear one player missed 50 games with the Ebola virus.)

I can't find realistic settings for the injury levels, so that the game plays fairly but realistically.

I loved MicroLeague, the all time teams and the 1986 season disk.

Bobm, was that an older version? I use 2008 and, aside from frequent 3-7 day dings (which I think are realistic), the injuries aren't bad.

I think I remember hearing that older versions did look like an ER.

[68] IIRC it's 2010 (with rosters through Opening Day 2009). The frustrating part is all of the 60-90 DL type injuries. It's ER meets MASH.

Doesn't anyone here play Strat-o-matic?

what game is it that some people use zips for?

FPS:BB was great. My fav pitcher was always Joey Hamilton who was fairly invincible, and batters like Eric Young who had good contact numbers and ran well could end up with outrageous numbers of doubles and steals. On the whole it was fun.

On one FPS: BB game I played as the Rockies Larry Walker went >60 hr & >60 steals for five years in a row! He was an unstoppable machine!

what game is it that some people use zips for?

Diamond Mind.

I used to play OOTP, but found it too easy to win. Over the course of 6 months, I played with all 30 teams and managed to get them into the playoffs within 3 seasons.

Even the Royals are a good team once you trade for Mauer, A-Rod, Manny, Santana and Peavy.

65: Thanks. I might soon be getting a PS3 ... but am not a video game guy at all - the only ones I've ever liked were text based sports games (DMB, OOTP, etc...)

I can corroborate the injury story in Baseball Mogul. I think this was the 2006 version or so. Fun game, but every September, like clockwork, half of my team would start breaking legs and tearing shoulder cuffs and whatnot. It's infuriating to sim a meaningless late September game after you've already clinched the division and then get slammed with a 437 day shoulder cuff tear to your best pitcher.