When some companies update their sports games, the changes from release to release are so minor, so cosmetic, it would make Jane Iredale jealous enough to look into IP infringement. That’s not the case with Wolverine Studios and developer Gary Gorski.

2007 has been a banner year for Gorski and Wolverine; they began the year updating their pro basketball game into the well-received Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball, them releasing the second iteration of their pro golf sim, Total Pro Golf 2. Now, just before the Christmas holiday, the company has managed to release their version of college hoops, Draft Day Sports: College Basketball.

Actually, DDS:CB is an update of Gorski’s last take on college ball, Total College Basketball, which was originally released through Grey Dog Software before Gorski broke off on his own and formed his own publishing concern, Wolverine Sports. Since he was the sole developer working on TCB, he was able to take the game with him, but with the release of DDS:CB, the franchise is now back to being completely in his control.

Using a code base and design sense that debuted in DDS: Pro Basketball, College Basketball is functionally quite different from Gorski’s pro game. For one thing, instead of a pro draft and free agent period that predominantly takes place in the off-season, DDS:CB boasts one of the most detailed, advanced and in-depth college recruiting engines found in any college hoops title on any platform; yes, that even includes beating out the critically-acclaimed College Hoops 2K8 from 2K Sports, found on most console systems.

In Total College Basketball, recruiting involved only a slim selection of actions, including putting a player on a weekly call/watch list, as well as the occasional opportunity to schedule a campus visit, home visit, watch a game, or scout a game in-person. While that game stuck very closely to real-world recruiting limitations, the interaction between coach and player was limited but functional. With DDS: College Basketball, recruiting has grown into a complete game experience all its own, and can take place both in and out of season, still in strict accordance with current NCAA contact restrictions, as well as a realistic budgetary limitation on recruiting. (e.g., the larger the school you coach at, the higher the budget available for recruiting the best possible players.)

The main difference between TCB and DDS:CB is that the new game has amped up the sense of real contact between player and coach. One is able to interact directly with potential recruits via interactive phone calls, and the player’s responses are based on not only his general interest level in your program, but in your coach’s ratings as well. Also, recruiting success is highly dependant on coaching skills in DDS:CB; even the best coaches won’t necessarily see a player’s true ratings in basketball skills and abilities, but a less experienced coach with low ratings in the areas of scouting and recruiting, for example, could really vary quite a bit from their actual, hard-coded abilities.

For example, with low ratings, a less experienced coach might look at a Greg Oden-style player and see only an average center, while at the same time looking at a guy like Minnesota Gophers center Spencer Tollackson and seeing an all-Big 10 talent where only an average player exists. As one progresses through a coaching career and improves these abilities, perceptions will stray less and become more accurate, but will never be 100 percent true.

This is because that even among very talented coaches, opinions vary and DDS: College Basketball reflects that; current Gophers coach Tubby Smith, for example, valued Canadian point guard Devoe Joseph very highly and pursued him with intensity before signing him. Joseph actually plays shooting guard in Canadian high school ball, and so some equally-talented college coaches never pursued him has a point guard prospect. While Devoe was highly pursued by both Kansas and Minnesota, for example, Florida and Duke never seriously went after him.

Wolverine developed DDS: College Basketball by following a very public path of opening the beta testing of the game to anyone who purchased a pre-order of the game. This allowed the company a plethora of opinion from the people who play the game most: devoted fans. While no game releases without any flaws, this public beta has produced a relatively stable, clean version of the game in its initial release.

Also, developer Gorski has announced on his company’s message boards that the game as released will see new features introduced as time goes on, as he has added to the code base the capacity for several new features suggested by his public beta-testers, but that are, in release version 1.0, currently not utilized. Therefore, we can expect the game to get even more feature-rich as time goes on and successive patches are released.

Supported once again by a devoted and prolific mod community, Draft Day Sports: College Basketball’s official release is free of any trademark infringement, but for those who desire a more genuine, real-world experience with the game, there are unofficial mods available that can enable those daring enough to modify the game to make sure they are playing, for example, the Minnesota Golden Gophers, rather than the Minnesota Rodents. Since these mod designers are not employed by Wolverine and reap no profits from their freely-distributed efforts, it’s a no-harm, no-foul situation that can make the game feel perhaps a bit more authentic.

The real benefit of the game, however, is the way in enables multiplayer online leagues to be formed and supported through the game itself; a full-featured commissioner’s office is available so that online league administration is possible. In the 1.0 release, however, this is the least-changed feature of the game and although some much appreciated minor fixes have been implemented, such as making it possible for the game to track the money spent each week on recruiting functions by each team, the game still tasks the commissioner to enter many functions manually, rather than allowing each player to accomplish these tasks within the game and email their team file to the commissioner.

This is an unfortunate oversight that makes being the commissioner of an online league far more labor-intensive than it ought to be; hopefully some of the upgrades waiting in the code for future patches include automating some of these owner/commissioner tasks by expanding the actions the .tem file is able to capture.

Such minor oversights, however, do not make this game any less amazing an upgrade than it is. While many uses of Total College Basketball never thought the game could be improved, Wolverine and Gorski are, as always, incredibly open to user feedback and have implemented the best and most-often requested improvements into the new title already; as future patches promise only to add to the experience, the end result is a game that is at the top of its class. Whether compared to competing text management sims or the company’s own released in the past year, Draft Day Sports: College Basketball is the best game of its kind on the market today.