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Well, here we are, almost a year since I reviewed Out of the Park Baseball 10, and I am honored once again by the fine folks at Out of the Park Developments to be given a chance to review their newest edition, Out of the Park Baseball 11. Fortunately, as a videogame blogger in no need of pronexin, I have the maturity to offer an honest review even though I’ve been offered a review copy of the game.

I’ve been able to watch Out of the Park Baseball 11 develop from its late beta stages to its current and more recent release, and I will say that I’ve been impressed once again, as I have been for the last few versions I’ve reviewed, with how in-touch Out of the Park Developments stays with the feedback of their beta-testing team as well as the users of the game. Issues that have been brought up have been addressed and patched with reassuring frequency, and issues that created problems early on have been addressed. This sort of ongoing support is likely why OOTP Developments has endured through ten editions of its game and is now beginning its second decade.

As usual, I prefer to judge a baseball game by looking at how accurately they capture the Minnesota Twins. This isn’t purely capricious on my part; first, the Twins are my home-state team and the only team I feel I actually know well enough to compare them to their videogame representation. And as a smaller-market team, if a developer gets the details on the Twins right, you can usually be assured they got the Yankees, Red Sox, Angels and A’s right as well.

First of all, I must point out that OOTP 11 has been surprisingly accurate on the Twins this time out. Their entire minor-league system is correct down to contract details, including the staffing of those minor-league teams; for example, Joe Mauer’s brother Jake is listed as manager of one of the Twins’ minor-league teams; I checked it out and they got it exactly right. That’s something that can’t be said for 2K Sports’ MLB titles, or even for Sony’s, over in the console world.

So what about simulation accuracy? Well, I simulated the Twins 2010 season up to the current date without making any changes to the team other than those generated by the game, such as injuries. To eliminate bias, I even had the CPU manager shuffle things around when such injuries arose.

As I write this review, the real-life Twins are 33-24. At 57 games into the 2010 season, the Twins in OOTP Baseball 11 stand at 32-25. While the scores were obviously mildly different from the real-life results, to get within one game of reality, albeit with a fictional injury list generated by the game, is proof to me that the folks behind OOTP Baseball 11 are NOT just making wild guesses and designing the game around biases toward favorite or popular teams.

Of course, I’ve come to expect this sort of accuracy from OOTP Baseball over the years; their game isn’t always a perfect prognosticator, but it does a better job than most baseball fans on any given day of the week. I’ve also gone on to play the off-season, and it’s a valid engine for simulating the sort of trades other clubs will agree to and which ones they won’t; it isn’t often that one robs another team blind in a trade in OOTP 11. To get someone of value, you must surrender players of like value.

The closest I’ve come to any sort of “steal” in OOTP 11 is a trade for center-fielder Andrew McCutcheon; I offered up one legit starter of 4.0-star value and two young prospects, but that wasn’t enough to get the deal done; the team I was bargaining with countered, asking for any one of five other prospects to be added to the deal.

I tossed in one of those players and they hemmed and hawed, but finally agreed to the deal at the Winter Meetings.

I gave up a starter and three very good young players to get a 4.5-star quality center-fielder. The four-for-one deal reflects the sort of deal-making that must be done to obtain someone of value. While it looks one-sided now, my McCutcheon deal reminded me a bit of the Twins-Giants trade that sent A.J. Pierzinski to San Fran in exchange for Francisco Liriano, Boof Bonser and Joe Nathan.

At the time, none of those three had proven themselves in the majors and Pierzinski was well-thought-of. That Pierzinski bombed after that, while Nathan became one of the best closers in the majors, Liriano had an amazing first year for the Twins before injuries set in, and Boof Bonser was a journeyman is the hindsight of the deal.

The talent I gave up to secure McCutcheon might blossom as well; McCutcheon seemed a great fit with the Twins when I made the trade, but his career was marred by injuries in successive seasons that held him back from fulfilling all my expectations, though he warmed the seat nicely for a draft pick center-fielder I’d picked up the summer before the trade. Also, the deal freed up salary space for me to keep much of my Twins intact for a few more seasons.

Of course, this reflects the organic nature of the game; even a deal that seems one-sided at the time doesn’t always turn out that way. After all, for every A.J. Pierzinski trade the Twins have made and come away from looking wise, they’ve had moments when they’ve looked foolish, such as being forced to cut David Ortiz for no compensation, before Big Papi blossomed with the Red Sox. Or trading away Johann Santana to the Mets for, well… no one who’s worked out all that great. Might as well say, “nothing.”

In that sense, Out of the Park Baseball 11 is sometimes a bit smarter than the real-life sport it is simulating, since it allows fewer block-headed deals.

What has impressed me this season more than in previous years is the historical simulation aspect of OOTP 11, which goes back as far as professional baseball has been played, and brings you up to the modern era. While Baseball Mogul does this, it does so without an historically-accurate financial model. While not quite perfect, OOTP 11 is much better on even that front.

Specifically, the game allows you to select starting a league in pretty much any year since the inception of professional baseball. It then takes you through a six-step wizard which allows you to customize your historical simulation to a preferred level of historical detail.

One of the details you can select is an accurate financial model. As the game explains it, “If you select to begin in 1940, ticket prices, attendance, salaries and the like will seem low, but will increase as time progresses.”

While I haven’t had the time to test out all 100+ years of professional baseball history to be certain that this accuracy is maintained year-to-year in career mode, I can vouch for the fact that, whatever year you choose to start in, the financial model is accurate to that year.

In this respect, Out of the Park Baseball 11 is far and away a superior historical simulator compared to the only other PC baseball management sim I’ve played that has attempted this, Baseball Mogul. BM has an inflexible financial model, meaning that while BM allows you to start at the inception of baseball and play to modern day, it all happens using the modern financial model. That means that in the Depression Era, you have Babe Ruth in the 1930s getting paid $20 million a season, while 60,000 fans per day flock in at ticket prices ranging from $20-$250 per ticket, and buying concessions like $5 hot dogs and $7 beer. In the Depression Era? Some Depression!

That doesn’t occur in Out Of the Park Baseball 11; the 1930s financial model reflects a 1930s economy. The amount of historical research alone required to achieve this is nothing short of dizzying! And yet, here it is. A truly impressive accomplishment that has made its impact on me as a reviewer more strongly this year than in any previous release of the game. In fairness, OOTP has been at it for a while, fine-tuning this aspect of the game before OOTP Baseball 11… but the realization of it in this year’s release has really impressed me with its attention to minute detail.

Not perfect? True. But very close.

In fairness to Baseball Mogul, by the way, that game is made for a younger, less demanding audience; Out of the Park Baseball 11′s audience is the true stats-obsessed baseball geek, and their historical simulation, therefore, is far more accurate.

Does the game stick strictly to history? I don’t know. I remember, for example, when the Minnesota Twins’ Kirby Puckett became the first pro baseball player to be granted a contract extension that paid him in excess of $1.0 million a season. That happened in the 1980s. Does OOTP Baseball 11 allow you to start in 1921, for example, and not hand out a $1.0 million/season contract until Puckett breaks down that financial wall in the mid-1980s? I don’t know.

But just the fact that each year is accurate-to-history when you start it is, for me, more than enough to set Out of the Park Baseball 11′s historical simulation mode far and away above the competition.

About the only complaint I have that really sticks in my craw is that, although toned down a bit from OOTP Baseball 10, OOTP Baseball 11 still features an injury rate to big-name players that seems far and away more frequent than is encountered in real-life. While the code hasn’t taken out my top three batters and four of my five starting pitchers, as OOTPB 10 did, there have been stretches where I’ve had as many as four or five starters injured at the same time for stretches lasting from two weeks to five months.

While the shorter-term injury people cycle back in quicker, those who the game decides are injury-prone never seem to stay on-the-field for very long. So, although the injury rate, especially to major stars, has been improved in OOTPB 11 over last year’s version, I’m still not convinced it’s an accurate injury-rate model just yet.

I should also add that the interface has been updated mildly, and while it improves the readability of the text on-screen, the layout is still a bit complex and requires a somewhat steep learning curve. Once you get accustomed to the layout of the game, the interface becomes less of an issue, but it’s not a game the newbie is going to pick up and understand completely, intuitively, within the first 30 minutes. The learning curve is probably pretty steep for the first couple hours, then tapers off for another few hours before becoming comfortable and normal.

As I said last year, I don’t employ a star-system, a 10-point score or a letter-grade in my reviews. That makes reviewing a game of this caliber a dumbed-down experience that allows readers to skip over the body of the review to see the final “score” of a game. I’d rather readers of my blog read the full review, then decide for themselves if a game is worth their hard-earned sheckles or not.

I can’t imagine, however, any baseball fan not enjoying Out of the Park Baseball 11 much more often than the time they spend finding minor faults and complaints about it. Right now, there’s just no other PC baseball management sim on the marker that even comes close, and even the baseball games in the console world cannot match OOTP’s accuracy. Well done, Out of the Park Developments!

I’ve been playing a fair amount of Out of the Park Baseball 11 ever since my review copy arrived; I know I’m not the fastest reviewer out there, but there’s a reason; when I review titles these days, I want to really dig deep and offer not only praise for what I enjoy about a particular title, but constructive feedback about what I think could be improved in next year’s edition.

I’m finally getting deep enough into OOTP 11 to begin considering a review. I may be a slow reviewer, but at least I’m not a flippant one when I set my mind to it! Sure, some people would rather hear about Disney vacations than read what I think could be improved in a game’s inflation-adjustment system for historical sims, but hey… if you want surface reviews, there are plenty of places to find them.

You won’t get one here.

Several months ago, developer Shaun Sullivan moved his PureSim Baseball franchise to a new publisher, Wolverine Studios. Now, for the first time since the move, Sullivan and Wolverine have admitted that work on PureSim Baseball 3 has begun; the announcement was made by Sullivan, through the act of establishing a PureSim Baseball 3 Beta topic in the Wolverine Studios forum.

PureSim 2 is available for $19.95 from Wolverine’s Web store and currently is in Official Release version 2.59. Virtually no other information is known nor has any been made available at this time. However, I’m not sure I’d trade a Sony VAIO for any guarantee on a release date; the overhaul is expected to be significant, which means a fair amount of development time, I’d guess.

I recently picked up the almost-full-priced expansion to Dragon Age: Origin… Awakening. I was a bit shocked at the sticker price: $40 for something that doesn’t seem to add much more than some $5-$8 expansions I’ve bought through PSN. Of course, at least those one could play right away; Awakenings is designed for high-level players who’ve finished the first game and its expansions and want to continue on for another 20-30 hours.

I guess it’ll be fine, though I still wish whiny developers would get off their butts and design 1080p games for 1080p systems. Now that my wife and I have a 1080p set, we’d really like a few titles that actually take advantage of it… otherwise I’d be better off spending my time on a bumbleride indie twin.

4. The Final Fantasy franchise (PS2, PS3, PSP, GBA, DS, GameCube, Wii, 360, mobile)

Once, this series would have ranked right at the top of my list; that was back in the previous decade, the 1990s, when Square was arguably at the top of their game. However, the turn of the century saw a marked drop-off in production, as well as some stagnation, to be frank.

The proper installments that actually were released in the past decade include Final Fantasy IX on PSone in 2000, Final Fantasy X on PS2 in 2001, and the MMO-RPG, Final Fantasy XI on multiple platforms in 2002. Then there was the long silence before, late in the life of the PS2, Square released the long-awaited Final Fantasy XII in 2006… and it was almost overshadowed by the release of the PS3.

Japan already saw the release of Final Fantasy XIII in 2009, but it will be a new decade by the time the title hits US shores, so it just doesn’t count.

Still, each Final Fantasy installment was beautiful for its time; FFIX was a wonderful swan song for the PSone platform, FFX was a platform-defining game for the PS2, a model which all other PS2-era RPGs paid homage to, and FFXII was a glorious swan song on PS2 that made some people wonder why a new generation of hardware was even necessary.

The only real stinker in the series proper was the MMO-RPG, FFXI, which has seen regular updates and is due to be replaced sometime early in the new decade (2010 or 2011) by Final Fantasy XIV. Still, for series purists like me, FFXI doesn’t count and should never have been made part of the main series’ numbering, but the launch of a new online-only series that could have been called Final Fantasy Online or something like that.

Sure, like a lot of people, I didn’t care for the sit-n-watch combat system of FFXII; but at least it saved me loads of joint pain from all that button-mashing hitting the X button tends to inspire in other Final Fantasy titles.

Be that as it may, and despite all the missteps and delays this decade, the wonderful gaming memories I’ve enjoyed at the hands of FFIX, FFX and FFXII still rank this RPG as an all-time favorite series… in this past decade or any other it has been part of.

7. Prince of Persia (PS2, Xbox, PS3, Xbox 360, PSP, DS)

I almost ranked this series higher, but the top of the list is going to be crowded with great, great franchises, so it was just about impossible to bump it any higher. All the free medical travel in the world isn’t worth as much to me as one good Prince of Persia title.

Now, I’m a bit of a late-comer to the franchise. When the PS2/Xbox trilogy was being published, I was not big on action-adventure-platformers and viewed the the Sands of Time, Warrior Within and The Two Thrones with some suspicion; I figured it was a “me-too” title in the Tomb Raider mode.

How wrong I was, but I didn’t discover that until I picked up the game on a whim in its first PS3 appearance. A franchise reboot, the PS3/360-era Prince of Persia, which came out in 2008 originally, was full of cell-shaded beauty and HD eye candy. Plus, it was addictively fun to play! It’s one of the first games I had played all the way through in years, and boy was it worth it; I’ve almost completed my second go-round on it, and even coughed up for the add-on adventure through the PSN Store.

With a major motion picture on the way and the first PS3/360-era sequel coming this spring, namely Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, it’s a great time to like this franchise. But the series makes my list because I’ve gone back and purchased all three of the PS2 Prince of Persia titles and found them quite good for the era in which they were made, but also they are evidence of how dramatically the franchise has grown and matured over the past decade.

Of course, the game goes back quite a bit longer than the last decade, with roots in many 1989-era home PCs, Macs, Commodores and home videogame systems. It is a concept that has weathered… the sands of time!

8. The Sims franchise (PC, PS2, Mac, DS, PSP, iPhone, mobile platforms)

First unleased in January 2000, The Sims is a “life simulator” that allows you to control electronic people from the comfort of your real-world TV. Just entering its third official iteration, The Sims 3, the series has been a huge and consistent seller for publisher EA Games, even though they never really put it on a discounted sale.

That’s because the game itself is just loads of fun; too many people get sadistic pleasure, for example, out of forcing a sim to pee itself, or leading it into a room, then removing all the doors and windows and sources of food, water or cleansing and watching the little thing go ape until it “died.”

Once EA realized this, they of course nurtured it by offering even more amusing “torture your sim” animations and scenarios. Sure, plenty of folks play the game more straight-up, but that’s the beauty of the franchise; there’s no “wrong” way to play it.

11. Guild Wars (PC)

Although strictly a PC-only title, Guild Wars was more influential in the past decade than just about any other PC MMO RPG. Why Guild Wars rather than World of Warcraft, which has many more subscribers?

One simple reason: Guild Wars put to death the concept of high monthly fees for MMOs. It was the first MMO to only charge for the software and make playing the game free of charge. It was as revolutionary as an acne solution that works!

Sure, Guild Wars has seen its popularity wane toward the end of the decade, and there are still some MMOs that charge monthly fees; but thanks to Guild Wars, they are no longer the only online game in town, and the recent wave of “browser-only” or “free download/free to play” MMO RPGs is due in large part to the ground broken first and more importantly by Guild Wars.

19. The Neverwinter Nights series (PC)

Offer me an RPG, and I’m happy. Give it a D&D license, and I smile. But make it one of the most revolutionary PC experiences in the past decade, and I won’t stop smiling for a long, long time.

Introduced in 2002, Neverwinter Nights was built off an improved Baldur’s Gate game engine, but was one of the first RPGs to offer a developers kit so that the mod community could build their own adventures using the same tools as the pros who developed the game. These “user-generated adventures” became about as handy as motorhome insurance following an accident… in other words, essential!

For a long time, Neverwinter Nights just never wore out its welcome because of all the wonderful mod adventures that BioWare fostered and encouraged. It was a game that set the tone for many of the RPGs that would follow it, such as the Elder Scrolls series and some of BioWare’s own later masterpieces.

It wasn’t until 2007 that a sequel was even released; by that time, BioWare had moved on to many other wonderful projects, and were replaced by the capable Obsidian Entertainment, who have served the franchise well, even if they are a bit less inspired.

One could even stretch the point that without Neverwinter Nights, the whole idea of downloadable content now sweeping across Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network might not even exist. Extending the appeal of a title by adding content beyond that included in the game’s initial release – rather than saving it for a sequel – is a popular idea these days, but it was tested, popularized and proven to work by this ground-breaking title.

Long live Neverwinter Nights and Neverwinter Nights 2! Here’s hoping the new decade eventually brings forth a Neverwinter Nights 3…

One of my favorite PC sports sim developers, Wolverine Studios, has been in an open, public beta on their next game, Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2, for a while now; I must say that the game is progressing nicely.

The most recent beta, 0.9, was released December 13 and includes some feature implementations that, if they make it to the final build, will certainly set a new standard for pro basketball sims. And I appreciate that the developer is taking their time with this title, rather than rushing it to a flawed final release.

I’d love to share what some of these new features are, but since they aren’t locked in for the final release, I’d rather not hurt the title by talking about them just yet… in case they don’t make the final cut.

As far as I know, anyone wanting to save money on the final release, though, can still sign up, pay up-front for the in-progress software, and have a license that will last for the lifetime of the product, even after it’s out of beta and in final release form! That’s more value than the average Nordic Track coupon code!

Now that they are offering the ability to pay for free, I’ve finally downloaded, installed and started playing a game I’ve long been interested in: Dungeons and Dragons Online.

How does the game make money if the download is free and so is the ability to play? Well, you can buy some expansions and special in-game items at the DDO Store; it’s a business model used in strategy games like Evony, but a bit more ambitious than anything tried by an MMO prior to this.

After all, even one of the most notable pioneers of free monthly play MMOs, Guild Wars, charged for the software, at least; DDO isn’t even doing that – at least not for the main game.

Here’s the down-low: While I haven’t yet played deeply into the game, I will say it sizzles smoothly along on my nVidia 1GB 9800GT-powered system, and looks great doing so. And with a nice enough opening movie, character creation system and an opening sequence that matches up well with Dragon Age: Origins, Dungeons and Dragons Online is worth far more than its price of, well… free. It might even feature free directory submissions for all I know!

I’ll get more specific as I play more deeply into the game, but for now, it’s all positive.

PureSim Baseball 2 is now available from Wolverine Studios, rather than its previous publisher. The game, developed by Shaun Sullivan, will replace the previously announced title, Draft Day Sports: Pro Baseball, which Sullivan briefly considered giving birth to at Wolverine before the deal was arranged to move the PureSim Baseball franchise to Wolverine, maintaining the brand identity of Sullivan’s franchise.

Currently available for purchase, the game has been updated to v2.31 with 2.32 available in beta. While the game is doing quite well, no word on whether Wolverine needs any call center services to handle the order volume related to the PC baseball mainstay!