Last night I was awake until almost 2:30 a.m. playing around with a new software toy Out of the Park Baseball 4.0. This is not only the best baseball computer game I’ve ever played, but easily the best sports simulation game I’ve ever played.
One thing to get out of the way up front is that this is not necessarily true for people who place historical replay value as the number one criteria for a baseball sim. If you want to sim the 2001 MLB season and have the results come out as close as possible to the real thing, then Diamond Mind Baseball is still the way to go. OOTP 4.0 certainly results in realistic statistics, but has some simplifications and lacks features that a game like DMB has that are necessary for getting complete replay accuracy (which, frankly, has never interested me all that much).
Where OOTP 4.0 shines is that, as one of it’s promotion pages put it, it is “Tweaker’s Heaven.” You can pretty much create any sort of baseball league you might like, determining everything from the style of play (Dead Ball era, etc.), tweaking overall league stats, editing stadiums, setting salary caps, dealing with the finances, managing minor leagues, all the way to calling the shots and going out to argue with the umpire during a blown call. Or let the computer do as much or as little of all of that stuff for you and focus on the parts of baseball sims that are most appealing to you. This game is so into tweaking, you can get into deciding criteria for inclusion into the Hall of Fame and the various post-season awards for rookie of the year as well.
Another extremely impressive aspect to OOTP 4.0 is its excellent HTML export features. A lot of baseball sims have HTML export but most of them aren’t nearly as obsessive with exporting everything as I want them to be. OOTP 4.0, however, is more than up to the task.
Last night, for example, I created a fictional league with 2 divisions, and 6 teams in each division. I set all the teams to be run by the computer and simmed a season (which on autopilot like that took about 10 minutes). The I exported the league to HTML — this was baseball geek heaven. OOTP 4.0 created almost 7,000 files totaling around 36 megabytes (note, you don’t have to be as obsessive as I am about this stuff — if you want a short but sweet version or something in between those two extremes, that is easily accomplished).
I had box scores and play-by-plays for every game, a plethora of statistics and ratings on every player, extensive records for every statistic you could imagine, financial reports, attendance, fan interest — everything I could have ever wanted.
The only real drawback to OOTP 4.0 is the lack of a pitch-by-pitch mode for simming single games, which eliminates a lot of the strategy of baseball.