Some quality updates to a quality game.

User Rating: 8 | Out of the Park Baseball 11 PC
I have played three of the baseball text sims out there (OOTP, Baseball Mogul, and Puresim Baseball). These three games are career-oriented games that let you carry your team foward year after year and try to give the player the control a GM and manager would have. These types of games are not 'replay' games that try to replicate a particular season.

Out of these I think OOTP is the best option. when I tried Baseball Mogul several versions ago, the results it came up with seemed pretty wonky. Maybe it has improved, but since it was quite poor when I tried it I haven't bothered going back. Puresim is a pretty good game. The results it produces are quite good, but it lacks many features that OOTP has (this may be a plus for some baseball gamers, but not me).

OOTP puts out believable results, lets you configure almost any type of league you can think of, and tweak many of the rules. The contracts that you can offer your players are quite detailed. The minor league system is fairly robust. You can even play with realistic park factors (i.e. some stadiums are easier to hit HRs in, etc). You can play with fictional players or historical players imported from the Lahman database.

The fielding model in this version is much improved. OOTP supports facegens. These are computer generated models based on photographs. This gives more atmosphere to historical leagues as the players sometimes look quite like their real life counterpart and appear in the correct uniform for the team they are on in OOTP.

There are some things that are less than perfect in the game (trade AI, AI roster management) but they are not game breakers. It just makes it easier to win (that is why I put the difficulty at easy). The game is deep and has lots of things to keep you busy. If Markus at OOTP can improve some of the AI oddities he will have a real gem. Right now it is just a very good game, beating out its competitors in my eyes as the best baseball sim on the market.