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Intro
With big names like High Heat and Triple Play Baseball floating around the market, it’s sometimes easy to forget that there’s sometimes more to a good, solid baseball game than flashy graphics or the latest celebrity endorsement. In fact, there’s a pretty popular niche market focusing exclusively on text-based sports titles, and Out of the Park Baseball 3 is unquestionably one of its all-stars.


Gameplay: 10/10
If you’ve never played a text-based sports title, the concept might seem a little tough to swallow; the lack any flashy animations or polygon counts will likely throw off your average GeForce 2 – owning gamer the first time they boot up Out of the Park Baseball 3. The meat of the game lies not within its visuals, however. No, the real draw comes from its hardline, top-notch, unrelentingly excellent gameplay, and make no mistake: this THE game for the hardline baseball fan or armchair GM. Virtually every imaginable aspect of running a baseball team to be found somewhere underneath Out of the Park Baseball 3’s hood, and virtually all of it is done as well as you could possibly hope it to be. Sick and tired of seeing guys like Gord Ash lose top-name talent in exchange for career minor-leaguers? Can’t stand to see pitchers giving up homeruns inning after inning? Befuddled by your favorite team’s lineup? Well, all of this and more is at your fingertips within this fantastic game.

In Out of the Park Baseball 3, you’re saddled as a sort of all-purpose overseer of any baseball team of your choice – though it should be noted right off the bat that, since it doesn’t officially license the teams and players of the major leagues, the game bears its own fantasy league. This might irk some, though it thankfully comes with a built-in option to import real-life stats from any individual, team, or league from essentially any year that the game has existed, thanks to Sean Lahman’s Database, available at http://www.baseball1.com. Once you’ve adjusted, tweaked, and plugged in all the teams to your liking, it’s up to you to develop your team into a potential World Series candidate, which is definitely no easy task. In fact, there’s any number of factors and tasks that you’ll have to constantly be dealing with if you want to stand any hope of keeping your team from being a cellar-dweller. You can start by picking up coaches, which help determine the core performance of your team, from scouting to pitching to your minor leagues, so be sure to choose wisely. From there, you can run the spring draft and spring training, or, if you prefer to mind other things, you can leave these issues to your newly-hired coaches, who’ll take care of things according to your preferences. Once the early days of April roll around, you should be good and ready to really get into the swing of things.

The sheer level of detail inherent in your options at this point is nothing short of breathtaking. For instance, you might want to focus upon establishing your batting lineups, so you’ll have to fill out your team’s depth charts so that your coaches know who belongs where and how often. Then, you establish the actual lineups, though the exact makeup will depend on which of the situational types you’re filling out. Pitching lineups are fairly similar, leaving you to determine who’ll get used in clutch situations, and who’ll get put on the mound when you need a solid reliever (or two or even three, if your bullpen is having a bad day). Once you’ve taken care of the basic face of your team, you might be interested in trying to fill a few holes; maybe your outfield is a little lacking, or maybe your shortstop just doesn’t have that jump like he used to. A quick visit to the Player Trade (or, alternatively, the Free Agency) screen will do trick, where you’ll be told flat-out which parts of your roster are in need of an overhaul. Knock on a few doors, make a few offers, maybe dump that 6,000,000$ arm that hasn’t been doing so well this year for some younger talent, and you’ll be well on your way.

Reams of information are available to you at all times, so there’s never any question as to what’s going on in all corners of the sport. You can easily access reports that detail your players’ development, your finances, your player trade records, your team salary (broken down to the man), the number of games you’ve won or even the number of games you have to win to nail down a wildcard spot. Box scores and even play-by-play records are kept for each and every game played, so you can analyze just where your defense fell apart, or which pitcher won you that series against those damn Yankees. In fact, you can verify all of these reports for any team across board, so you’re never left scratching your head as to who got traded where, or who your rival has scheduled for an upcoming game. In a Baseball Mogul-ish touch, this year’s edition of Out of the Park introduces a “newspaper” that details any incredibly spectacular events that took place that day, such as four homeruns by an aging slugger, even complete with a fake interview, and a brief recap of the events. This is really the only area where Baseball Mogul has Out of the Park Baseball 3 nailed dead to rights: although it’s certainly interesting to observe these amazing feats in a kind of newspaper format, a lot of amazing accomplishments never get mentioned. Whereas Baseball Mogul’s newspaper truly breathes an entire new level of excitement to the proceedings by offering recaps every single day, Out of the Park Baseball 3’s version is simply there. You never really feel the need to flip it open and scan the headlines for your player’s names, though it admittedly does give you a small thrill to see your guys mentioned as Player of the Week. Still, if I could ask the developer to put a bit of spit-shine one particular area of the game, it would be this one.

You can make all the trades and lineup changes you want, but in the end, all that really, truly matters is how your team performs on the field. Thankfully, the portrayal of the sport is as fluid, comprehensive, taut and riveting as its real-life counterpart. With the players’ names strewn about their appropriate positions on a graphic of a baseball diamond, you can observe the action unfolding in true color commentator style within a nearby text box. Although its descriptions aren’t pitch-by-pitch (not this year, anyway), it instead “jumps” to the point where some sort of relevant action is going to take place, skipping the occasional strike or ball to instead bring you to the base-hit, pop fly, towering home-run or strikeout. Although some of its competitors are content to allow you to merely view the results of the game, Out of the Park Baseball 3 actually enables you to get into the action by suggesting general plays – such as Pitch Corners or Sacrifice Bunt -- to your pitchers and batters, though the effect might not always end up as intended. You’re also able to make more direct alterations, such as pulling in the outfield or substituting a pitcher who’s giving up one too many runs, or replacing a hitter in a clutch moment. Playing through the games in this fashion is a terrific way to gauge your players’ performance and to truly feel as though you’re running the show, and although you can always view the box scores and play-by-play recaps later on, it’s not nearly as involving. That aside, it really is nice to be able to hit the Sim button to skip the carnage if your team is performing really horribly, leaving the terror to your coaches.

Of course, none of this would be possible without the players themselves, who are detailed and as intricate as their real-life counterparts. Each individual not only has such basic stats as age, a birthday, and a player number, but also features a vast range of tidbits that include injury ratings, position strengths, defensive and offensive ratings, and hitting/fielding/pitching tendencies. Make no mistake: the wealth of information offered here is Heaven for stat nuts, who can track down just about any fact that they could wish for. Curious about your star slugger’s longest hitting streak? Want to know the amount of doubles he racked up in May? Need to check and see how he’s been performing on the road this year? All this and more and be looked up with a few simple mouse clicks; it’s so expansive that it’s almost overwhelming, but not so much so that you can’t appreciate how useful and fantastic it all truly is.

In the end, it’s all about balancing your personal managerial style with your team resources, both on the field and off; sure, you might really want to have nine 10,000,000 Carlos Delgados in your lineup, but doing so will break your team’s precious finances by year’s end, not to mention that you’ll be left high and dry if you need to sign any contract extensions. It might seem like a good idea to skimp on your coaches so you can get that ace pitcher you’ve been eyeing for years, but you’ll find your players developing much more slowly, if at all, forcing you to run your team on time-tested talent. In this case, you’ll find yourself frequently having to trade away your top-shelf minor prospects as well as the occasional big name in order to maintain a high-performance roster. If, on the other hand, you’re the type of person who likes to foster growth through gradual ground-level, minor league development, heavy investment in top-notch coaching is a definite must. This staggering flexibility extends to all areas of Out of the Park Baseball 3: if you’re more of a hands-off, financial mogul, automate everything via your coaches and simulate away. If you’re a stickler for detail and prefer to oversee every possible area of your team, then leave your coaches to development duty as you handcraft a winning crew. It’s as involved or as hands-off as you want it to be, thus suiting all types of players, as well as all types of moods.

Graphics: 7/10
As it’s text-based, the title’s graphical aspects aren’t nearly as important as its gameplay or intricate statistical detail. The info screens feature a sleek, clean look that puts the focus on whatever relevant information is at hand, rather than having fanciness for its own sake. The “ballgame” screen overlays the player names on a rather plain ball diamond, which is more utilitarian than anything else; it does what it has to do, and that’s about it. Thankfully, there are dozens of fan-made “stadium packs” that you can very easily insert into the game, thus enabling you to “see” your teams play in their real-world environments. Much the same can be said for the team logos: fake emblems are used, since this is not an officially licensed game. The replacements are decent enough, if not somewhat generic; once again, it’s a simple matter to find home-grown, high-quality logo packs. All in all, there’s not much worth noticing in this particular area, which is fine, since the downloadable patches improve matters greatly.

Sound: N/A/10
When I said that this was a game that focuses on its gameplay, I wasn’t kidding. There is no sound whatsoever in this game. At all. This isn’t really a bad thing; you can listen to your own music as you plow through the game, and again, sound isn’t nearly as important as gameplay in a text-based title such as this.

Control: 9/10
Even with the sheer volume of information that the game offers, Out of the Park Baseball 3 has an incredibly intuitive and simplistic control system. A few clicks are all that’s required to access any statistic, report or list, and playing through an actual ballgame isn’t much more complex. In fact, if you don’t feel like using the mouse while you’re managing your players, you can even use the keyboard, though this is somewhat more limited than the mouse. Still, there really is nothing to complain about when it comes to the game’s interface; it’s nearly perfect.

Overall: 9.5/10
Although the complete lack of any modern, flashy visuals will likely scare away the vast majority of prospective players, the fact remains that Out of the Park Baseball 3 offers what is by far the most complex and comprehensive baseball experience ever created. Nearly every conceivable aspect of America’s game is covered here, and you can have as much or as little control over it as you wish. If you want to hand-pick your way through the draft, and oversee every inch of the team while dutifully managing every single game, you can do so. Or, if you prefer to mind the finances and try to mould your budget into a World Series winning team, then let your managers do all the dirty work. It truly offers something for every type of player – even featuring opportunities for online leagues -- and has a simple enough interface to remain accessible to everyone. Given, it has its rough edges – the occasional bugs, persistent problems with the Lahman Database, and the somewhat lackluster newspaper feature – but these flaws are really quite minor in light of the sheer fun factor that the game offers in abundance. With its timeless text-based gameplay evoking images of warm summer afternoons spent listening to your favorite announcer call out the ballgame on the radio, Out of the Park Baseball 3 is for the most passionate fans of the national sport. It’s available online (http://www.sportplanet.com/ootp3) for a pittance, or if you’d prefer a hard copy, you can buy Season Ticket Baseball, which preserves the game’s core and only disables a couple minor features. Either way, it’s a great deal, and one that any fan of the sport should take up.

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