Review by: William Abner

Text based sports games are for the grognards of the genre. If you’re the type of gamer who enjoys the text scene, then no game can have too much detail to satisfy your appetite for information. After all, that’s how sports are broken down by people every day – numbers. Raw data. How many yards did a guy have? How many hits? What’s his field goal percentage? With this in mind Draft Day Sports Pro Basketball 2 (DDSB:2) from Wolverine Studios is likely to please part of this fraternity, but not all of them—it all depends on how you want to play the game.

As a simulation and general NBA World Builder, DDSB:2 performs admirably. Players are rated in a slew of categories from hard stat ratings like shooting ability to more nebulous, personality traits like work ethic and greed. There are 15 categories in all. The game even rates your own skills as a coach—whether you are more offensive minded, etc. There’s a robust financial model in place which allows you to use the current NBA soft cap structure or a more straightforward hard cap if you desire, allowing you to customize how you want your league to operate.

The guts of any text based game is its simulation engine. If a text game continually produces strange results then it’s a very tough sell for those who are likely interested in such a game. It’s easier for a gamepad driven game (like NBA 2K) to get away with a less than convincing stat model. Games like DDSB:2 live and die by it, however. Thankfully, it passes with mostly flying colors. You will see the occasional head scratcher from time to time but as far as I’m concerned that’s a good thing – as long as the stats look believable it’s worth putting your time in playing a game like this and DDSB:2 produces statistical results that most NBA fans will find acceptable.

In fact, this is the best way to enjoy the game – playing as General Manager and simulating a week or so at a time, watching how your team performs from the sidelines, keeping an eye on player personalities—who is happy with playing time, who is becoming a nuisance, and so on. It’s rewarding, like it is in any good text game, to put together a team and watch them grow over multiple seasons as players come and go and new ones take their place either via trades, free agent signings or the draft and it’s here where the game earns its keep.

As a coach, it’s less of a success. Watching the games play out is a bit of a chore and I found that your options as coach were a tad too limited for my taste. You can’t call specific plays, which some will find odd, but what frustrated me was that I couldn’t call a play for a specific player – even out of a time out. All you can do as a coach is call time outs, make subs, set defensive matchups, call a press, pester the referee, and set very generic play styles. It’s a tie game late in the 4th and you have one possession left. What’s the call, coach? The game never allows you to truly make that call, which is unfortunate. This is really the biggest gameplay knock on the game – there’s simply too little input from the user during an individual game, which is why fast simming is a much better way to enjoy it—especially in a multiplayer setting.