"Baseball Mogul 2002" More Screenshots

Guide Rating -

"Baseball Mogul 2002" puts in you the General Manager's seat, so decisions will finally be made the way you want. You are responsible for the lineup, trading, finances, and more.

Gameplay
After you pick your team, and look at your lineup you'll notice the lineup is from the 2001 baseball season. You can then try trading with other teams, put a player on the trading block, check finances, and make strategic decisions. And that's even before the games start! As far as finances, you are responsible for paying for training, giving money to the farm system, and scouting.

My favorite part of the game is trading for better players, or signing free agents. Mainly because its fun to build up your lineup with a list of star athletes, and then beat all the teams that usually beat my team during the regular season. But having a lot of star athletes, can be costly so be sure to check those finances. Or else you may end up going half the season without putting any money into scouting, the farm system, and the medical team.

A very cool feature the game is that it generates text files with play by play and statistics for each game. Its not just for your team either, you can get stats and play by play for every team. You can easily save the text files to your hard drive, if you want to keep records of everything.

The interface is easy to use. You change screens by using the file menus. There are some shortcuts. I would have liked to have seen a side navigation system, instead of having to go to a menu each time. But there are some keyboard shortcuts that can be used.

A very important part is how fast does the game simulate games. If you want rush right through the season (you can play a number of seasons with the same team) you can. You have the option to play half the season, a full season, one day, one week or one month. After each time period passes you get messages about who was injured and offered trades.

A feature I wasn't expecting to find was being able to set offensive, defensive, and pitching strategies. Example - For offensive strategies you can choose to use hit and run more or less often then the average. For pitching you can choose how long to let pitchers pitch when they get in trouble, or how many pitches they can throw.

Graphics
The graphics are very simple. Really the only graphics are the pictures of the players, and a few simple graphics if you win the league. But it works for the game, since the focus isn't on graphics. Its about statistics and making the right call.

Conclusion
This is the baseball game for sports and simulation game fans. You have complete control over your team, both the lineup and finances. If you enjoy playing in fantasy sports leagues, you will absolutely love this game. This game is jam packed full of features you wouldn't even think would be there. If you would like to try playing against others you can try the online.

Minimum System Requirements

• IBM PC Pentium 100 or better
• Windows 95/98/2000
• CD-ROM drive
• 16 MB RAM Mouse
• SVGA monitor w/ 256 colors
• 80 MB free hard disk space