GamerZap

OOTP and PureSim are at the top of the heap when considering the overall completeness of their simulation of the world of baseball.  Out of the Park really shines in managing multi-player online leagues but is just as entertaining when playing alone against the computer.  OOTP has the most extensive farm system simulation, you can set it up so that you'll have an entire set of fully-manned minor league squads.  Play using historical data or take on the challenge of taking a franchise made of fictional players.  Great fun and a free demo is available for download at their web site.  At around $35 OOTP is slightly more expensive than competitors, but you'll undoubtedly get plenty of fun-bang for your bucks.

New for 2007:  The Out of the Park folks recently released the 2007 version of the game and we've spent a significant amount of time playing it over the past week.  It's BIG - in several ways.  It's a big download, over 60 megabytes.  It use some big memory and processing - it's best that you forget about doing anything else with your PC while playing OOTP (our PC is a little over a year old, with 1GB of RAM and it still struggles a bit).  And it's seriously complex, if you want it to be.  Fortunately, it's not so complex that it's impossible to play.  At the same time the options are so multitudinous that you could spend days or weeks exploring them.  And, finally, it's big fun.  Just playing against the computer it's easy to get into the mindset of "us" versus "them" as you try to find deals, sign free agents and make choices in the annual amateur draft.

As of this writing, OOTP 2007 has only been available for about a week so we're playing the with initial release.  Unfortunately, that means that there are some bugs in the system.  Frankly, some of them are pretty much inexcusable for a commercial release that seemed to have recruited a rather large number of testers for beta releases.  On the other hand, they do seem ready to quickly release "patches" that will fix the problems that "early adopters" have been very quick to point out.  And there are still some bits of funkyness in the user interface that probably won't be "fixed" in the near future (e.g. depending on where you are within the software sometimes a team information page is HTML-based (much slower to be generated) and other times it's just written to your screen).

Overall, it's still a great game.  And you can download a free trial (for both Windows-based PC's and Macs!) at the OOTP baseball web site.