GamerZap

PureSim Baseball 2007 is the latest incarnation of the popular baseball simulation designed and developed by Shaun Sullivan.  The complexity of the game is such that it's useless to try to list all the features here.  Let's just say that Mr. Sullivan has tried to incorporate everything from the world of professional baseball into his game.  Flexibility is a major part of PureSim, with options covering most aspects: Manage your team pitch-by-pitch or just be the GM and let the computer do the managing.  Work with historical players and their statistics-based abilities or create an "association" full of fictional players.  Handle a full 60 player organization with 3 levels of minor leagues or just worry about your 25 player major league team.  And on and on the options go...

The most obvious competitor to PureSim in terms of realism is "Out of the Park Baseball" (OOTP).  With all the major and minor tweaks you can make your leagues, your teams, your players, even your ballpark, PureSim is unequaled in flexibility - which might not be a good thing if it was necessary to pay attention to all those options.  But it's not: you can have plenty of fun playing the game choosing less complexity and using default values during initial set-up.

Our one complaint with PureSim is that the interface isn't as friendly as it could be.  Sometimes options are found in the middle of the screen, sometimes on the left side, sometimes on the bottom.  Given the game's vast number of options, it's possible to get a bit lost.  On the other hand, there's plenty to love about PureSim baseball.  We like the "PSPN Newsletter" that gets published a couple of times every "virtual month", full of statistical highlights about what's going on in your simulated league.  In general, the statistics component is fascinating.  If you're at all into baseball statistics, you'll probably spend a significant amount of time looking at all the data generated by the game as seasons go by.

No need to visit your local games store to buy PureSim 2007, you can find it ready for purchase and immediate download at the PureSim web site.  Free demo version available for testing, too!  (The price for the downloadable version was $29.99 at the time of this review, making this a very good deal for a very sophisticated product.)