When you add in the utterly addictive Road to the Show feature, the minor leagues, the physics, the realism, the franchise mode, the manage mode, and the stunning level of detail you are left with a baseball masterpiece. It's the kind of game that years later we may look upon with an even greater appreciation.
2. Out of the Park Baseball; Out of the Park Developments
The only real “text” sim on the list, OOTP deserves to be where it is for many reasons, but the most important is that it allows you to create your own personal baseball universe and it does so under a fantastic interface, believable (and plentiful) stats, and superb customer support.
OOTP has been around for several years now and has fallen under various company umbrellas but one thing has been constant: developer Markus Heinsohn, a German born baseball fan who took our game and showered it with the attention that it deserves. OOTP is such a wide ranging game that you could replay the entire history of the sport on your PC – starting in the early 1900s and working your way up to the present day—with real players after importing them via the Lahman Database. Dozens of first-rate online leagues are run daily on the web as would-be skippers work their magic. Here’s just one
example
: You can literally lose yourself inside OOTP. It's that engrossing.
For baseball history buffs as well as hardcore stat freaks, OOTP delivers in nearly every way possible regardless if you want to create an entirely fictional universe or use historical or current rosters. The only thing missing is real-time visuals like the old Micro League game. There are other text based sims out there and many of them very good such as PureSim Baseball or even replay sims like Diamond Mind, but OOTP remains the king of the genre—Baseball Nirvana
1. High Heat Baseball 2001-2002 PC; 3DO
Lock me in a room and force me to play one “arcade” game today and it would be MLB 08: The Show. There are technical factors that older games simply cannot compete with, but no game, when considered in its own time period, was as good as High Heat Baseball on the PC.
The franchise reached its short lived peak with the 2001 and 2002 editions and they were specific to the PC. The console games weren’t in the same league. It had perhaps the best interface of any baseball game to date, shockingly realistic gameplay for an arcade game, and a career mode that at the time was second to none. Add in the fact that you could tweak the in game tune file to get it to play exactly how you wanted it to and you had the perfect baseball game – all except for the graphics which were, even at the time, less than eye popping.
Many fans considered this game to be the logical extension of Earl Weaver. No game, perhaps up until The Show, had captured the old Weaver idea of “believable hands-on” play as well as High Heat Baseball. No game captured the essence of the pitcher-batter duel as well as High Heat, and no game came close to its level of AI.
