Slitherine

quote:

The devil is in the details and this is the element where Puresim Baseball 2005 falls short.

The game rates batters in Contact (affects batting average), Power (home runs), Eye (patience, walks) and Speed (stolen bases). In playing the field, players are rated on hands (errors on balls they reach), Arm (throwing arm) and Range (getting to balls). Pitchers are rated on Stuff (how sharp their pitches are), Control (walks), Velocity (how fast they throw) and Endurance (how long they can pitch in a game). All players are also rated on Potential (how likely they are to improve). These areas are reasonable choices, but the translation depends on the underlying stats in the Lahman database can definitely skew players away from reality. This observation pushes Puresim Baseball 2005 clearly into the 'game' and not 'simulation' category for me. Baseball is one of the most documented sports on the planet, with huge amounts of observations and statistics making up its history. When players pop out of a database that has little relation to reality or worse, has little relation to their place in baseball history, then it is hard to consider the game a true simulation.

The rating scale choice has an impact on how the player develops over time. In choosing a larger rating scale, the ratings improvements seem much too gradual. As an example in using a 1-100 rating scale, players might gain +1 improvements in one of the skills. Baseball is rife with examples of players exploding into the best seasons of their careers and then sinking back to a more modest normal production, typically based around the age of 27. The game's treatment of skills makes this unlikely to occur. Sure, they might have a series of good seasons, but the game appears not to produce these breakout seasons that might be well out of normal ability for the player. Player development, as a whole, doesn't work particularly well since there are often gigantic leaps in ability at young ages for players, and the game fails to simulate that component as well.

Another area where the game falls well short of reality is in the actual management of a club's roster. There is no modeling of the current rules from Major League Baseball regarding options to move players between the Major and Minor leagues, nor is the 40-man roster used in Major League Baseball a consideration. This lack is another key indicator for showing that Puresim Baseball 2005 is a game, not an accurate simulation of baseball. A lamentable choice in the design is forcing the player to have exactly 25 players on both their Major and Minor League roster before the game will completely cycle through the off-season. This choice is amazingly annoying in that all the lineups also have to be correctly adjusted. Fortunately, the game has an automatic adjustment option for the rosters, lineups and rotations available, but forcing this choice on the player is a bad design decision and something I intensely disliked.

After the initial draft, a key aspect of any sport management game dealing with multiple seasons is the creation of new players. This is another area where Puresim Baseball 2005 lacks a realistic focus. By failing to place any emphasis on the farm team development inherent in Major League Baseball, Puresim Baseball 2005 again falls clearly into the game category and not the simulation category. A draft of newly available players occurs every season, and though this element is as entertaining as the initial draft, the players available are instantly Major League ready. This choice is understandable given the design choice not to model the Minor League Development process, but the draft should feature mostly young players, since it only has players available for the first time. There are many younger players available and they tend to be the more highly drafted, but there are also a disproportionate amount of older 'first time' players available. These older players show little higher development for the most part, which makes them only roster filler material and leaves me questioning why they are appearing.

A clear failure in Puresim Baseball 2005 is the game manager. The AI manager does not adhere to basic rules observed by a large majority of baseball managers over the life of baseball. A clear indication of this for me was in the first inning of the first game I managed. With Alex Rodriguez at bat and Derek Jeter on 2nd (they had been drafted by the same team, just as in real life), Jeter attempted to steal 3rd with two out in the inning. Jeter was thrown out to end the inning, a choice that would be extremely rare in normal game management. The instances where the manager strays from good baseball choices are many. Some that I saw included making the first or third out at 3rd base while advancing on a hit, not trying a sacrifice bunt with a weak hitter when the go ahead run was at second base with none out, etc. The game manager attempts entirely too many steals, even when told to tone that element down. In simulating an entire season, I set the manager of my club to 'very rarely' on stolen bases. I was very surprised to review my stats following the season and discover that I still had players stealing 70+ bases. Platooning, or trying to get hitters that hit from the opposite side as the pitcher, has been around in baseball for a long time and is now a key component of the modern game. The usage of relief pitchers by the game manager seems to focus more on the number of batters faced than the possible advantages of bringing in a left-handed pitcher to try and stymie a dangerous left-handed batter.