Out of the Park 2

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Review: Out of the Park 2.0

This comprehensive stat-based game allows you to recreate a historic baseball season or roll your own--either simulating the games rapid-fire or playing them out at-bat by at-bat.

The details will start trickling into your consciousness when you reach the pre-game lineup screen. Hot and cold players are color-coded (flaming orange for streaks, and icy blue for slumps) with a sample of their stats over the streak or slump is provided.

The trickle turns into a stream in the text play-by-play, where you can expect to read how the batter played the previous day, and how he ranks among league leaders in various stats categories.

As you progress farther into the game, the stream steadily widens into a river. When the game reports an injury, it doesn't simply indicate that such-and-such a player is hurt and for how long, but how he hurt himself, the precise nature of the injury and its seriousness. The ratings that influence player performance can actually get better or worse over the course of a season as rookies become more seasoned and veterans age. The game cites key events in each game and names players and hitters of the week for each league.

And when you research the particulars of a player's performance, you're treated to a virtuoso statistical display of the kind I'd previously associated only with Strat-O-Matic CD-ROM Baseball.

Individually, the examples above probably seem trivial. But, taken together, they represent a level of care, involvement, and understanding by the two-man development team of what makes running a baseball team fun and interesting. In an era when mainstream computer baseball games sometimes seem more similar than they do different, OOTP2 does very little that feels generic or commonplace.

At the same time, while OOTP celebrates detail, it doesn't want for substance. It's well supplied in solid features, ranging from a straightforward, strategy-oriented baseball game to a financial system, minor leagues and built-in editors.

Note that it's not big on graphics--consisting mostly of text--and I couldn't detect any use of sound at all. But I didn't miss them. Indeed, some elements here I've never seen in a game before. One is OOTP2's ability to generate a vast quantity of data in web-ready HTML format. You can assemble the content for a web site for a custom league in a few seconds with a single click. I've run many computer-baseball leagues--printing out stats, photocopying newsletters, looking up data for managers seeking up-to-the-minute reports--and this is a dream brought to life. (However I'd suggest the designers add an option to automatically export all reports in HTML, so the game won't ask you for each game.)

In addition, using a database that can be downloaded for free, you can recreate a historic league from any season in the past century--a feature that, when present in other computer baseball games, is typically accompanied by a fee for the data disk. When playing OOTP2 in career mode, the game is supposed to automatically add in the appropriate rookies for each subsequent season, allowing you to effectively replay the history of baseball.

Unfortunately, I never got far enough into this feature to see if it works. Even using the patch, the game regularly crashed midway through simulating my 1900 season.

In addition, given the otherwise impressive depth of OOTP2, the computer manager seems curiously under-developed beside those in Strat-O-Matic 5.0 or High Heat 2001. And while I initially liked the scouting reports on the talents of individual players--not simply sets of ratings, but real reports written in plain English--they came to sound too much alike from player to player. Incorporating supporting stats would lend character to this run of bland text.

But these amount to a few errant details in a game replete with thoughtful, well-conceived ideas. I can't imagine creators Markus Heinsohn and Steve Kuffrey topping it  and I can't wait to see them try.-- Peter Olafson / GamePro