While creating a league, you have a few options (options are good!): You can choose to start in any year from 1900-2005 with all the players from those years, you can import a schedule from any year that www.retrosheet.org hosts, select whether to use the reserve clause or not, which leagues will use the DH, and how high player salaries will be. All this is very good, to say the least. But, notably missing is the option to include interleague play or not. It's automatically chosen to be used by default, but I would prefer to have the option of selecting it or not.

I decided to start my game in the 2001 season as the Toronto Blue Jays. Why? Well, I like the Blue Jays, and I wanted to see if Barry Bonds could hit 73 homers in a sim. Just to kill the suspense, he didn't hit them. Once I started the game, I noticed several things: The payrolls were all way, way, WAAAAY too high. Every team had between 100-175 million in payroll room. Second, there didn't seem to be any kind of minimum pay scale. All players seem to have contracts well above minimum salary, and even during the draft, you have to sign the player to a contract that is almost always well above minimum. Number one draft pick in 2002 was Mark Prior, who was signed for two years at 11 million per season. Considering league minimum is 300,000 dollars, this makes the sim a tad unrealistic.

You will also notice that there are no coaches, managers, scouts, or minor league budget to pay for. This really takes a lot of the challenge and realism out of the game, as now there is no difference between farm systems or between how different teams rate different players. This has been a staple of text-based baseball games for years, and I'm very disappointed that this wasn't implemented.

The interface itself is a bit of a problem. It has nice graphics for a text-based game and all team and player names are hyperlinked, but it is just not very intuitive. To sign free agents, you have to go into your own team’s roster and then click on “sign free agents”, rather than just going through the front office menu or “player” menu. There is also no “search player function” which is a huge pain when you're looking for specific players and don't want to have to scroll through all the teams or “show all players” alphabetically. This is an option that should have been included.

It is also very difficult to find statistics within the game itself. While trying to set my lineups, I could not find left/right splits for OBP or SLG percentage. This makes it very difficult to properly set your lineups, because you have to guess who would be better given a left-handed versus right-handed pitcher. You can look up these stats in the leaderboard, but having to jump back and forth from screen to screen is a hassle. During the games themselves, all I had access to were splits on batting averages, which should not be the case in a baseball simulator. Even worse, though, is during the World Series, EVERY split, including batting average, was set to zero. When trying to pinch hit or bring in a pitcher from the bullpen, I was essentially left blind because the game would not show me how they did during the season.

The trading system is also in need of a tweaking. There is too much of a demand for relievers. When AI teams will gladly trade a young Johan Santana for an above average 24-year-old set-up man, you know the AI is going to be in trouble. The AI also falls victim to the dreaded “team need” bug. To summarize: Boston had a need for a starting pitcher so I traded them Hideki Irabu for Nomar Garciaparra. Well, then Boston was without a starting shortstop so I traded them my back-up, Alex Gozalez, for Hideki Irabu. Essentially they traded one of the best shortstops in the league for a barely capable starter. The game lacks a very sophisticated trading AI.

The players’ ratings are also a tad problematic. In terms of hitting, they only have ratings for contact, power and eye. Pitchers only have ratings for control, stuff, and velocity. What this means is that when simming, the ratings come back unrealistic. Both Shawn Green and Carlos Delgado hit 61 home runs in my simmed year. Now, they were both great powers hitters back then, but it's because they hit a lot of doubles instead of all home runs. With the rating system as it is, it does not differentiate between doubles and home runs. Pitchers are simmed a bit better, but there should be separate rates for hits allowed and strikeouts, walks, and home runs allowed. There is also no difference in the statistics between how a batter fares between right-handed and left-handed pitchers. Every baseball fan knows that some hitters do much better against righties than lefties and vice versa. It is a big problem for a text based sim to be lacking this kind of diversity in the ratings.

Finally we reach the review of the in-game engine itself. There are some positives to it. They have a nice on-screen graphic that shows how many righty and lefty hitters and pitchers are left on the bench and in the bullpen for each team. The game also has fireworks go off whenever the home team hits a home run. During the plays itself, there is a little graphical ball that flies around the diamond to indicate where a ball is hit and how hard it is hit. Unfortunately, that is the extent of the positives. When each game starts, it plays the last line of the American national anthem. Not a bad touch, but the American anthem is also played in games hosted in a Canadian city. They should have included Oh, Canada in the game as well. And while the graphical ball in play is nice, the play-by-play text is very bland. It's a simple and unexciting description of the play, “Thome hits a grounder to second and he is thrown out.” The descriptions really don't have you on the edge of your seat. Better would be something like “Thome hits a hard grounder to second, Durham reaches out, grabs it and fires to first... OUT!”. Adjectives and action verbs are a good thing in play-by-play. The play-by-play also suffers from too much repetition. While I understand that repetition is a necessity in text based games, when a grand slam is hit we do not need to be told that the score is “Kotsay scores! 1-0. Wells scores! 2-0. Fernandez scores! 3-0. Thomas scores! 4-0.” I mean, come on! We know a grand slam is going to score four runs, just tell us “That's a grand slam for Thomas, 4-0 Blue Jays!” Simple, concise, and compact as opposed to just simple and lengthy.

Some of the in-game simming left me scratching my head as to what was happening. Well over 70% of tag-ups on outfield flies were thrown out, which is completely unrealistic. And this is fast runners being thrown out by guys with average arms. It doesn't jive with reality. There was also the case where Sandy Alomar Jr., a slow footed catcher, somehow managed to double to the pitcher. Or when Mark Kotsay managed to hit a triple to short center field. This is not realistic baseball.

The in-game engine also suffers from several oversights. One is that the balls, strikes and outs are only shown during the play-by-play menu, not anywhere on-screen when the batter steps up to the play. This is something every game should include. When a base is stolen, the pitch, whether ball or strike, is not actually counted in the play-by-play menu. The stats are also not updated in the play-by-play menu during the game. So, if Frank Thomas hits home run number 39 in his first at-bat, the play-by-play menu will still say “Frank Thomas is stepping up to the plate with 38 home runs on the year.”. Last, and most annoying of all, is when you make some lineup substitutions before the game, sometimes the computer will just disregard them when the game starts and you have to make all the changes over again. These are all simple mistakes that should have been weeded out during the play-testing phase.

The game is also lacking a bullpen function, so you have no need to worry about warming up pitchers. It takes one element of strategy out of the game completely. Players also fatigue too easily. I've had players play two games in a row, rest a game, play three games in a row, rest a game, and then been completely fatigued for the sixth game. Two days of rest over a 7 day span is more than enough rest time for baseball players.

The game also suffers from a number of in-game AI issues. I have seen left-handed pitchers intentionally walk a left-handed hitter to load the bases, only to face my right-handed hitting clean up man. Or walk my left-handed hitting second batter (with a .312 OBP against lefties) to face my best hitting left-handed hitter (hitting .350 OBP versus lefties with a .575 slugging percentage). This doesn't make tactical sense! Also the computer likes to make too many pitching changes in a game. When the score is 7-0 in the 8th inning of a July baseball game, the losing manager should not be making 3 pitching changes in an inning; he should be using a junkballer to save his best bullpen’s arms. They should also not be taking out their starting pitcher in the second inning after he has given up only 3 runs in a May game. It's a waste of a bullpen and, once again, not tactically sound or realistic.

I was looking forward to this game but am left quite upset with it. A few years down the road, Puresim may be ready, but so far this game is a low-level prospect who shouldn't be inserted in your line-up just yet.