As far as trades go, they are more annoying than anything else. Playing
through a season will subject you to a peppering of trade offers that range from
the absurd to the pointless. After the first few times you look closely at
a proposed swap of six journeymen players for another six of the same quality,
you'll quickly begin to simply kill each trade offer that comes by without
giving it much of a glance. First place teams trading hot prospects for a
proven veteran? Mutually beneficial star swaps? No and no, you'll
never see these types of offers come by.
This brings us to the financial side of the game. With your owner's hat
on, you'll need to raise the team's revenue to ensure that you can pay for all
of those players you signed as the GM. To do this, you can set your ticket
prices, concession prices, set your TV deal, and create a budget.
Unfortunately, when working with ticket and concession prices, the game uses
slider controls that let you specify your prices with respect to the league
average without ever letting you know what that average is. Is a soda that
goes for 4% more than the league average way over-priced or are you giving fans
too large of a bargain? Why can't you just specify that a large soda
should go for $3 and be told what kind of profit margin that that would net you?
The team budgeting screen is not much better. You can specify the
number of points to spend on the farm system, scouting, and medical staff, and
are told where your numbers lie with respect to the rest of the league. As
with other aspects of the game, the point system is not very intuitive, and it
is difficult to tell how much a different there is between buying the most
expensive training staff in the league or going with the barest minimum.
In its favor, Baseball Mogul 2003 has licensed the use of actual major league
players in the game, giving it more of a real-world feel than can be gained from
rosters full of fictional players. Although it does not have a license for
the use of team names and logos, it gives you the opportunity to enter different
team names at the very start of the game, so after couple of minutes of typing
you'll have a league that resembles the real majors. The game's statistics
engine does a pretty good job of simulating a baseball season. The game
results and player statistics generated by the game during a season are
realistic, so you won't encounter an army of .400 hitters or teams winning 120
games. Also, the numbers generated by the licensed major leaguers stay
pretty true to the players' real life statistics.
To its credit, Baseball Mogul 2003 is pretty easy to learn and you can begin
playing in a minimal amount of time. Part of the reason for this is that
while the game does cover a lot of the aspects of running major league
franchise, it just doesn't do so with much depth. As such, it is
ultimately unsatisfying for the hard-core baseball fan that is attracted to
games like this.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated:
58%. A good stats engine and simple interface might make it appealing to the
rookie baseball management sim player, but veteran players and die-hard baseball
fans will probably find it too simplistic and ultimately unsatisfying.
System Requirements:
100 MHz Pentium CPU; 16 MB RAM; 4 MB
Video RAM; CD-ROM; 160 MB Hard Drive Space; Mouse.
« Page 1
