The Baseball Mogul series was one of the first of the GM style of baseball games. It was revolutionary that you could not only negotiate salaries with your players, but you could also set the price of beer at your stadium’s concession stands. Each year we have seen some improvement in the game. Will 2003 build on an already solid offering?
I was immediately impressed upon starting the game for the first time. It asked me if I wanted to visit the Sports Mogul website to look for patches. Since I always want the latest version (sometimes to my detriment as in High Heat 2002), I got the patch immediately. The download page is very straightforward, but installation is not. You must extract the patch and then manually copy it to your game directory. There are very clear directions on the webpage, but I think that it’s kind of silly to force the user to do a manual install. It didn’t bother me, but be warned if you’re the kind of person that is afraid to move a couple of files around your PC.
Getting started is exactly the same as in previous versions. I really appreciate the option to rename the teams. Clearly there is some sort of licensing legalism at work here that prevented Sports Mogul from using real team names. Take the few minutes it will require to rename the teams. Real player names are used for players who belong to the MLBPA. As an example, Cory Lidle is named “Barry Klingele” in Baseball Mogul 2003. Note that he also had an alternate name in High Heat 2003, so this is a general licensing problem.
The ultimate goal of Baseball Mogul is to establish a high Mogul Rating. This rating is modified based on the market you use. If you play with the Yankees you will take a significant hit on your rating whereas playing with the Royals will give you a big bonus. Combine shrewdness and frugality for the optimum score.
I learned about these modifiers through the excellent help system. The online help feels like an extremely well designed web page. This was especially nice to find compared to the .pdf file or Windows Help format usually used for such games. I highly recommend taking the time to poke around the online help to find answers to any questions you might have.
Unfortunately, the team management pages are virtually unchanged from last year’s version. The look and feel is the same – strange. Again, the order of the players on the bench is critical to their role, especially with the bullpen. At least now we have little labels on the side of the bench to tell us which pitcher has what role and where the magic line between the bigs and AAA lies. Unfortunately, you must have a 5 man bullpen. While this is not usually a problem, it does limit your flexibility.
When you see a problem repeated through versions of a game it means one of two things. Either the developer doesn’t want to address the problem or the developer can’t address the problem. For various reasons I would say that this is the latter and fixing it would require some major work. I sure would like a more standard interface though.
