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Baseball Mogul 2008 Review (continued)
More User Submitted Baseball Mogul 2008 Reviews
Date: 2008-03-24
It Makes Me Sleepy
I've gotten to where I only play this game late at night because I usually get sleepy while playing it. It's not that I don't like the game, it's just not very exciting.
My first experience with Baseball Mogul was either 2000 or 2001, and not a whole lot has changed since then. I was really surprised at some of the minor errors I saw:
Instead of batting skill against Left and Right, it has Left and Left
Player photos do not always match position (Pitcher in Catchers gear)
I don't like it that a player pretty much has to get old, get bad, and then get sent to the minors before he will retire. Most veterans retire before they totally fall apart.
I have never been able to draft a good hitter. Pitchers are always the best players in the draft.
Pitcher ERA's are generally too high. Most teams end the season with an ERA of 4.50 or so. Not every team plays in Colorado.
The date for roster expansion is shown on my team page, but I am never able to actually expand.
I know baseball players are greedy, but there must be 30 players in my league that are making more then $20 million a year.
I would like to be able to assign my players workouts or drills to try and improve their skills.
Overall, I enjoy Baseball Mogul, but I will not buy it at full price, and I will not buy it every year; maybe every 6-8 years if it changes this little.
Date: 2008-02-25
Baseball Mogul
Great Game if you get into stats and want to run a team without all the graphic interface and baseball game details, yet you still can take control of the day to day couching if you like.
Date: 2007-10-28
Baseball Mogul 2008
This is a great strategic game. If you like sports and enjoy strategic planning, this is a great game.
Date: 2007-10-10
Good, not Great
Being a life long Strat-O_Matic player, this game intrigued me. The opportunity to play any player, any season was appealing. The GM aspect and pre-game managing of your lineup is great. The game suffers in game play. Animations are cheesey, and the ball parks don't change. I understand that there is a way to change the stadiums, I just haven't figured it out yet. Stolen bases are 50-50 at best, and pitchers always seem to fall apart in the later innings. Also, a dominant closer means nothing as of yet, as every closer I've used so far has managed to blow quite a few saves. The encyclopedia function is also interesting, and saving season stats is cool once you figure it out. Overall, not a bad game for $20, but I'll stick to Strat for realism.
Date: 2007-07-22
They really haven't improved it enough.
I'll assume most of you know the Baseball Mogul series, so I'll talk about the strengths and weaknesses of the 2008 release, rather than going over the basics of how the game works.
Overall, the game is still fun, but there's too much that they haven't fixed or improved. These are all problems that have been with the game since previous releases, and that the game-makers, for whatever reason, keep failing to deal with:
1. The box scores are still presented in a very strange format, not the AB-R-H-RBI format that all baseball fans know and love. Same goes with pitchers' stats in box scores: It's not IP-H-R-ER-BB-K, as it should be. Why can't the game designers fix this? Re-organizing the columns should be a matter of minutes.
2. Way too many baserunners are caught stealing. This has been a problem with the game since the very first release. It's absurd.
3. There's still no way to buy a stadium with a mortgage. You have to accumulate hundreds of millions of dollars in cash in order to afford it, because you have to pay for everything in a lump sum. That's silly, and it's not how stadiums are purchased in the real world.
4. There are all kinds of bugs in "commissioner mode." Sometimes you need to use "commissioner mode," and too many things go wrong. The amateur draft, for example, goes haywire.
5. The play-by-play mode is pretty unrealistic. Bunt a guy from second base to third and he'll almost always get thrown out. Don't even try to steal a base! I don't bother with play-by-play mode anymore.
6. Although the crazy offensive stats have been toned down somewhat from previous years, ERA's are still a touch too high overall. Sometimes no starter in either league will finish with an ERA below 3.00.
One thing they've improved slightly: the trading AI is not quite as dimwitted as it used to be. Go ask a team for its pre-arbitration pitching stud, and you'll usually find that it's impossible to pry the guy loose. So far, so good. But it's still much too easy to ship out aging stars instead of having to eat their contracts, and that's really the key to winning this game consistently. Another thing: cash deals are absurdly lucrative for a shrewd player. The computer overvalues your players and undervalues its own. If you pile up a nice mountain of cash, you'll find that you can buy some stars from teams for eye-poppingly low cash payments. With the "trading block" function, you can see just how much cash you'd get for any player you want to get rid of. Sometimes it's in the millions just for an ordinary player! They've tried to improve all this by instituting a no-trade clause for some of the best players, and you'll find that it's just about impossible to sign some of them without a no-trade clause, but it's still not hard to trade most players, because they'll usually allow a trade to at least one or two other teams (and you can easily discover using "trading block" which teams those are). I've only been caught once, in years and years of game-play, with a bad and expensive player who refused to be traded anywhere at all.
You can easily determine your ideal average ticket price by looking at the payroll budget in the Finances spreadsheet; just keep clicking around till the budget reaches its highest number. In the playoffs, when you'll really bring in cash, you'll need to use some trial and error to find the best price, but a decent rule of thumb is to raise ticket prices $10 each time you advance to another round. But if it's all just raw mathematics, why make players select their average ticket price at all? Just let the computer calculate the ideal price. It seems like a waste of time to me.
All in all: like the previous releases of Baseball Mogul, this is a good game with the several defects that you'd think the designers could easily address.
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