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Review of Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2
Coaching in college is a lot of work. But it can also be very rewarding.
December 8th, 2012

Why anybody would choose to coach college sports over professional sports is mind-boggling.

I realize most college coaches would jump at the opportunity to coach in the pros, but there are a handful who choose not to. Those coaches are crazy.

I suppose there is something to be said for being the king of a campus instead of just another pro coach that has a slim chance of lasting more than a few years. But look at how much more work coaching in college is!

•    Recruiting. Forget about game-planning and scouting your opponent. A good chunk of your time is visiting the inner-cities, suburbs and farmlands of America, trying to convince 16- and 17-year-old kids to come play for you.
•    Homework. You have to worry about your players flunking out of school. Can you imagine if Phil Jackson had to keep on Jordan and Rodman to do their homework?
•    Athletic Directors and Boosters. The boosters are paying for your fancy new practice facility and the athletic director is a bureaucrat with a PhD.

I think you get the point. Coaching in college is a lot of work. Tedious work. But it can also be very rewarding.

All of that is captured in Draft Day Sports: College Basketball 2 (DDS: CB2).

Staying Busy
As soon as you dive into DDS: CB2, you will be busy. You need to know that before starting. Otherwise you will get overwhelmed.

This isn’t a game where you can just adjust your gameplan a bit, pick up a few players with high star ratings and watch the season unfold.

Once you create your coach and get hired by somebody, you start right up with summer travel to camps held throughout the country. You need to learn a bit about each camp, consider the cost to attend, and pick the one you think best meets your needs.

Sure, it’d be nice to attend the Indy Elite Camp, but would it be smarter to attend a cheaper camp and use your recruiting budget elsewhere? (Going broke early in the recruiting process is a bad strategy, by the way.)

Once you decide which camp to attend, your schedule really gets hectic.

Recruiting
This is where the real work starts. When you first open the recruiting screen, you might just stare at it for a while, trying to figure out where to start. It can be daunting, but once you get the hang of it, you start to develop a system and some strategies so you don’t feel so overwhelmed.

The entire country is at your fingertips when you recruit. Want to pursue the No. 1 kid in the country? Go ahead. Want to focus on your own state? That’s not a bad idea. Want to mine a certain region of the county? Also doable.

Build your program .. Get recruiting!

Of course, your strategies depend on who you’re coaching. If you’re a top-ranked program like Duke or North Carolina, you’ll be chasing the top recruits. If you’re a tiny school that few people have heard of, you’ll be wasting your time if you recruit the top guys instead of focusing on players in your own state or region.

Of course, recruits don’t decide if they want to play for you right away. You need to stay in touch by putting them on your call list, inviting them to campus, and monitoring their interest. Eventually, depending on how well you do in the courting process, they’ll sign a letter of intent or tell you to buzz off.

I’m not going to explain every last detail of how recruiting works because that would take too many words. If you’re looking for a game with a fair recreation of what actual recruiting probably feels like – the highs, the lows, the excitement, the disappointment, the work – this is the game for you.

If you don’t want to be consumed by recruiting like a real-life college coach, you should probably find a different game.

Presentation
I’ve always found it difficult to make a connection with players in college sims. There are thousands of players from hundreds of schools with all kinds of ratings and stats that you have to sort through to find guys you might want to recruit. It can feel like combing through a spreadsheet.

DDS: PB2’s presentation does as good a job as possible of helping you get to know a player so he doesn’t just feel like a giant glob of text and numbers.
 

Each player has a face photo. His ratings and stats (and there are a lot of them) are organized in a way that makes sense and is easy to read. If you want to add a player to your call list, watch him live, watch him on film, pay him a visit, etc., you can do that easily with one click from the player information screen.

Player Card - Huskers Shooting Guard

The theme of this review so far has been how much work being a college coach is, especially recruiting. It’s also a lot of work in DDS: CB2, but the game’s presentation makes that work a lot more fun than it otherwise would be.

Gameplay
While everything you do off the court is in-depth, rewarding and very real, on the court leaves you feeling a little empty.

DDS: CB2 suffers from the same thing as its counterpart pro game suffers from: Once the actual games start, you’re pretty much relegated to being a spectator.

Yes, you can set your overall team strategies, depth charts, rotation grids and all that. You can even adjust your strategies during each game, but there are no options to call specific plays on a possession-by-possession basis. It’s frustrating because the game feels so hands-on off the court that you want it to feel just as hands-on on the court.

You want to have the option to control each possession so you can really make sure your recruiting and game-planning strategies pay off. Instead, once the games actually start, it kind of feels like a letdown.

Some players might like the more distant approach to the actual games. I guess that’s a personal preference. But it’d be nice to at least have the option to immerse yourself into each game with specific playcalling.

Final Word
If you’re looking to dive headfirst into all the ins and outs of being a college basketball coach, this game is more than worth your time. The depth and realism of recruiting is amazing and the all the other little things that represent the good and bad of college coaching are well-represented.

If you get scared off by in-depth player research and daily grind type of activities and would rather just call plays during a game, you might want to look elsewhere.

Everything that makes DDS: CB2 great will likely scare some people off. It’s very realistic, probably too realistic for some. Not everyone is going to be patient or dedicated enough to do the work required to recruit and maintain a successful program.

Those who do want to put in the time will appreciate the game’s presentation and immersion making their jobs more enjoyable.

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Our Review of PureSim5 Baseball
Definitely one of the Better Baseball Sims on the Market.
November 16th, 2012

It may be November, but if you’re anything like me, baseball is never far from your mind. And while console games like MLB The Show, and for many of you, the old MVP series, there are a great many players who are looking for something to fill more of the fantasy void. As a fantasy owner of eight teams, I feel your pain.

Insert PureSim5, a baseball simulation modeled after the OOTP series that most people are aware of. If you’re not an OOTP fiend like I am, here’s the link to one of my leagues: www.netsportssimm.com. From there, you can get a feel for what simulation leagues look like. I’m in two of these -- unfortunately, the archaic OOTP 6.5, which is fun but can’t hold a candle to the newer versions -- and basically the gist of it is that you start a league in whatever season you want, and progress from there. As you can see, we are in the midst of the 2042 offseason. I’m the Minnesota Twins, and am trying to spend additional money because the way finances work in the game dictates that I can’t pocket any more ‘cash’. Sounds weird to associate that with the Twins, but it’s where I’m at.

Actually, we did the exact same league and it crashed about 40-45 years in -- essentially where we’re at now -- so that tells you a. how long we’ve kept these two leagues together and b. that I’ve essentially played about 150-200 sim seasons (including defunct leagues). Indeed, I’ve been around the block a time or two on sim games.

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty on PureSim5. At the open screen, you get five choices and ‘quit’. You can do the following: New Game, Load Game, Quick Load, Mod Files, and Options. Most of those are self-explanatory, though I think Mod Files may be an exception. The Mod Files are where you can download things such as MLB faces, logos, and ballparks, as well as fictional team logos, All-Time logos, and background images. All of these serve to make the gameplay more customizable, and most of them are inherent to previous versions of PureSim. To get a feel for the game, I’ve downloaded the face pack. Adding packs to the game is relatively simple; all you do is download it and the game will add it automatically. I recommend restarting the game to make sure the update takes, but it doesn’t appear to be necessary.

One thing I noticed while tooling around the game is the discrepancy between the good players and the bad ones. The good players have consistently good rankings; free agents and poor players do not. And while this might be a Captain Obvious statement, part of me wondered if the gorge between the two is a bit too sizable. Like Madden in previous years, it serves to truly differentiate the haves from the have nots -- because let’s face it, three years ago nobody was chasing down Devin Hester from behind --  and that’s probably for the best since these players are free agents for a reason.

PureSim5 Player Cards

Opening a new game brings you a nice handful of options. You can start a game in PureSim classic mode, PureSim classic quick stars (you choose the number of teams, divisions, etc.), Major League Career (choose your year and format), Major League Career Tru-Transaction mode (you manage, GM makes moves as they occurred in real life), and Sandbox mode (any season 1900-present, with real players if you wish). Finally, you can choose your ratings format: 1-100, the 20-80 scouting scale, a number of 1-xx formats, and finally, no scoring whatsoever. The last option is how you want finances, market sizing, and free agency to work. You can be the equalizer with all markets the same size, or you can have it just like it is.

For the intents of my review, I’ll be the Minnesota Twins -- team I’m most familiar with -- and will sim through the entire 2011 season to keep it fresh and timely. Unfortunately, a 2012 option doesn’t appear to be available yet. So we have normal market sizes, free agency, and all that goes with what I feel should be an accurate replication of the 2011 baseball season. Let’s see if I can prevent the Twins from losing 99 games again!

Right from the get-go you choose your file name for a save; this is nothing revolutionary, you just have to make sure you can remember it. Then you select your team and change them off CPU. Then comes even further customization for your ‘association’ -- your league, in essence -- such as choosing size of rosters from 35-60 -- I’m using 40 like in real life -- as well as making expansion possible, allowing ratings to change in-season, and a handful of others. Here are the ones I enabled:

Expansion Possible

Injuries Can Occur
Player Ratings Can Change In-Season

Allow Computer AI Trades
Use Player Photos
Import Players Prior to their MLB Debut

I also selected a strict fatigue/durability model -- as opposed to age-based -- as well as DH in the AL, five-man rotations and closers on a pitching staff, and importing players’ historical stats. Finally, I selected TRU-life for the player development engine; essentially this models what players did in that real time frame, with potential adjustments due to natural variation and the like.

Random thought at this point: Wow. This game is very thorough on the front end. The final piece before starting the game is to import the major league players from the season that you’ve chosen. So far, the setup for a game might turn off people looking for a more basic interface, but if one can get past the intro, there are clearly options for players looking for all different playing experiences. Additionally, you can update some, not all of the options as your season goes along, so don’t fret making too many hasty decisions when starting up the game.

Spring training is the first activity that awaits prospective players, and it’s basically just a simulation of the Cactus and Grapefruit Leagues that we’ve grown to love as baseball fans. I’ve never really known anyone to enjoy these parts of games anyway, so I don’t think simulating through the spring is much of detraction. Before opening the season, PSPN -- clever, huh? -- posts its preseason power rankings -- Twins 22nd -- and an annual “most feared hitters” list. It’s a pretty cool feature, even if I don’t agree with the methodology (batting average and home runs? yuck). There’s also a “frugal or fancy free” feature that profiles team payroll. Again, cool feature, but not exactly necessary. Onto the season! We’ll be using the real 2011 schedule.

At the season opening screen, you can do a number of things. You can edit your association notes -- essentially a notepad -- as well as check season stats on an ESPN-like interface. It’s pretty cool, to be honest.

ESPN..err we mean PSPN Coverage!

Let’s have a peek at the roster and front office options. From the front office you can edit a lot of things -- keep in mind, I’m on commissioner mode -- such as GM and manager tendencies, as well as managing every single part of your roster. It’s really an in-depth, well done aspect of the game.

For this review, I’m going to try to improve the Twins club from within, using the best 25 men at my discretion to try keep the Twins from repeating their worst season in club history. Just for fun, I tried out the trade interface, and the Angels offered Tyler Chatwood for Danny Valencia. That seems like a pretty good offer, and leads me to trust the engine behind this game pretty well. Similarly, hitting ‘shop player’ will suggest a handful of players that other teams are willing to offer you. At this point, I have to tip my cap to whomever programmed the game engine, as this is well done.

Before I start the first game, I survey my front page with lineups and so on. The ‘Ask a Scout’ feature is pretty cool, where you can consult your local ‘scout’ on how he sees fit to update your team.

In the interest of brevity -- you’re clearly laughing at this 1400 words in -- I’m just going to start with the rosters as-is. Strangely, player stats for 2011 -- such as Joe Benson’s cup of coffee -- are in the game. For me, that makes 2011 rosters a bit strange.

Options for each individual game, as well as yours, are QuickSim and PSPNCast, which is similar to GameCast on ESPN. On your own game, you can also manage, which is the third option. I’ll manage game one before I sim for a bit. Game one features Carl Pavano and Ricky Romero, and before the game you get the option to alter your pitcher and batting lineup, as well as weather conditions and a few ‘quick facts’ before heading into the game interface.

The home page lists your lineup, the defensive players on the field presently, and some stat interfaces as well as a list of roster options available to you -- pinch hitters and relievers, essentially. Every time you strike ‘enter’ the game progresses one more step. You have the option to hit the B key (bunt), L key (lineup), 2 key (to steal second or third with 3 button, based on your base running situation), H key for hit and run, and much more. It’s really in-depth.

In the first inning, Alexi Casilla reached via a single, Delmon Young was hit by a pitch, and Jim Thome singled to center. I’m given the option to run on Corey Patterson (84 arm) with Casilla (71 speed). I went aggressive and scored, but this is a pretty cool option. So far, I’m really digging this game, and we’re just a few hitters in, even though the batting lineup with Joe Mauer hitting seventh and Jim Thome playing third is, shall we say, a bit odd.

Now, with Pavano on the mound and a runner on, I have the option to check the lineup, walk a guy intentionally, pitch around him, change my infield and outfield positioning, and do a pitchout or a pickoff move. Again, very thorough, as the Blue Jays score a pair of runs to make it 2-1. Now I’m not going to bore you with how the game turned out, so I’ve auto completed to the end of the game. Final score: Minnesota 4, Toronto 3 in 12 innings. Glen Perkins got the win, so for the fun of it, I checked his ratings. 85 stuff, 79 control, and 70 velocity. The 52 endurance is a bit high, perhaps mixing his starting days with his closer days into making him a possible rotation candidate, but even games like MLB The Show goof this sort of thing. I can’t complain too much.

I’ve opted to simulate through April at this point. The game pauses to give you options, such as pausing to see new issues of the PSPN magazine, and to let you know if there are injuries or trades proposed. On the left side of the screen is an overlay updating you on statistical leaders, such as Jered Weaver with the most wins, Fausto Carmona with the most walks, and even some team stats, such as Denard Span with a .372 OBP. This really helps the game have a good MLB feel to it.

At the end of April, the Twins are 13-16. Not good, but fortunately only a game-and-a-half out of first place. So basically, bad Twins and a bad division, just like 2011. Another pause the game makes is for scouts to evaluate talent periodically each month, which is a pretty cool feature. Oddly, simulating a month stopped at June 3, so I’m thinking it goes month-to-date rather than calendar month. No matter, as the Twins enter June in first place 30-27, with a three-and-a-half game lead on Detroit.

Now, we’ll move onto the All Star break, which takes us through July 10. Hold up; the Nationals are interested in trading for Scott Baker on June 21. Let’s take a look, shall we? The Nationals gave a list of one-for-one trades they would make. This list includes Tom Gorzelanny, Wilson Ramos, and.....Stephen Strasburg? Well, I’d be a fool to pass that up, but I think it’s a negative strike against the game engine, as this would never happen. In fact, up until the break, I got offers on every single major player on the Twins roster -- I didn’t take or even look at any of them -- as well as guys like Ben Revere and Trevor Plouffe. I like to envision this as how Terry Ryan’s phone might ring, but if the deals were anything like Baker-for-Strasburg, then you could probably assemble an All Star team in no time.

Fast forward to July, and from what I gather, there is no All Star game, just an All Star Break. Not a huge mark against the game, but an oddity to be sure. The stats at the break seem pretty reasonable, with the exception of Joe Mauer hitting .252/.333/.319 with just 3 home runs. What’s pretty cool is the game calculated his WAR (-0.1), wOBA (.300), and that he’d thrown out 49 percent of all attempted base thieves. As a huge sabermetrics geek -- I work for Fangraphs after all -- these are wonderful additions to the game engine.

Sabermetric reports!

Now we’ll simulate through August 31 to have a peek at the roster expansion options. On the way as we approach the trade deadline, plenty of deals proposed make sense, such as Span to Tampa Bay and Morneau to Toronto. I like to see a trade engine in games that can at least be somewhat realistic -- Strasburg notwithstanding. A quick peek-in during late July shows the team under .500 at 52-54 and still leading the Central. Yikes. It also showed 14 complete games for Cliff Lee in Philadelphia, which seems a bit high.

On September 1, a note pops up alerting the GM to make his call-ups to get to a 40-man roster, which I just auto’d. At a 40-man roster, you’ll obviously have to move some guys around to get them work, but it’s extremely realistic. On September 28th, the Twins clinched the division with a 78-83 record, and it led to a matchup with Boston in the ALDS. Obviously, after September you have to send players back down for a 25-man playoff roster. With little surprise, the Red Sox dispatched the Twins in three games. In game seven of the World Series, Roy Halladay outdueled Ervin Santana, and the Phillies won the World Series.

PSPN gives awards at the end of the season in a pretty cool format, and there are plenty of awards, such as Gold Glove, Silver Slugger, and a handful of others. Afterwards, when you head to the offseason, a prompt comes up with a score out of 1,000. For instance, my Twins score was 635, and three straight years under 500 will result in a GM being dismissed, which is a cool, if simple element of realism. After a pre-offseason evaluation of talent, we’re ready to start the offseason, which I’ll attempt to abbreviate to keep you reading.

After retirement, ranking of players, updating the almanac, listing individual and team records broken in-season, and talent evaluation, we’re ready to begin the offseason. The draft picks aren’t totally listed in a way that’s easy to find players, but the menus sort quite easily, based on talents and bonus demands. After the draft is completed, free agency starts, and the list pretty much accurately resembles last offseason’s list, with players like David Ortiz, and Jamey Carroll, but also some oddities like Alex Rodriguez. All in all, most things make sense, with the exception of Kevin Kouzmanoff asking for $3-plus million per season. And now, we’re back to the beginning.

All told, this is a fun game as long as you aren’t 100 percent committed to reality and realism. I’d definitely recommend it as a sim if you’re looking for something to supplement OOTP or something of the like.

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Review of Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 3
Could a Basketball GM sim revolution be on the horizon?
November 8th, 2012

Stats and analytics aren’t just for baseball nerds any more. The geeks have made their way into basketball.
 
Due to its endless statistics and 162 games worth of data, baseball has traditionally been the sport that was the most popular in the text sim world. With analytics and stats now taking hold in basketball front offices and the hoops blogosphere, could a basketball GM sim revolution be on the horizon?
 
If it is, one of the games leading the charge will be Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 3 (DDS: PB3), the latest offering from Gary Gorski at Wolverine Studios.
 
DDS: PB3 features a completely revamped user interface, artificial intelligence, contract rules and the introduction of season disks that allow you to start with a full league history and import draft classes.
 
The second version of Gorski’s pro game was excellent and more than filled my need for a fun, realistic and challenging NBA sim. I recently started playing the third version, so let’s take a look at how it stacks up:

Great Look
The first thing you notice after firing up DDS: PB3 is how great the game looks. It’s the GM sim version of a picturesque painting that hangs on your living room wall.

I don’t play GM sims for fancy pictures and graphics, but man, when the game looks good, it really ups the immersion factor. The studio-type setup during the draft and office-type of layout during the season really sucks you into DDS: PB3 and makes it easy to connect with your team and individual players.

Everything is laid out well, too. There’s a lot to do in this game, and it’d be a major hassle if you had to click 10 different times to do certain tasks. Thankfully, you don’t have to. It might take you a little bit to figure out exactly what you have to do and when you have to do it, but once you get your bearings, getting where you need to go is simple.

Playing the Game
Ok, so the game looks good. How does it play?

The short answer is very well. Statistics are realistic and it feels like you’re getting a very real-world simulation of professional basketball.

The first thing I noticed is improvement in the play game screen. I thought playing your games in the second version was a little clunky, but thanks to the new gameview mode, playing your games in DDS: PB3 is much smoother. Stats, play-by-play, subs, strategy options and the court are either all on your screen or just a click away.

One thing I would like to see added is the ability to call specific plays or call for specific players to try and score. For example, for each possession, I’d like to call for the ball to be dumped into the post to Dwight Howard, or simply select Kobe Bryant if I’d like the offense run through him on a possession.

It wouldn’t always have to work out as I call it, but I think that option would make the user feel like they have more control over the game. I like to feel like I have the power to actually execute some of the strategies that form in my head.

You do have some control over what your team does in-game (defensive sets, offensive sets, subs, etc.), but it could be a little more specific.

Solid AI
Want to try and trade Michael Beasley for a first-round draft pick? Not going to happen. The AI is strong and difficult to trick.

When simming games, sometimes I question why certain players shot so often or don’t shoot enough. Having a play-by-play log for each game would help simmers better understand the why and how of each contest. But you’re not completely powerless in what your players do, either.

If you choose to control your team as a coach in addition to being a GM, you can set your philosophies to favor fast breaks, jump shots, zone defenses, crash boards, etc.  You can also run certain types of offenses.

If you think Derrick Rose is shooting too many 3s, you can call him and tell him to stop shooting so many 3s and drive more. He might even listen to you.

Navigating the NBA’s financial system can get a little tedious, but the game offers the option for a simplified system if you don’t want to deal with the ins and outs of Bird rights and the luxury tax.
 

Play-by-Play and In-Game View

Digging Deep
Basketball is a simple game. You take a ball, you shoot it in a hoop, you run down the court and try to prevent your opponent from doing the same. However, there are all kinds of intricacies that take the simplicity of the game itself and make it much more challenging.

DDS: PB3 captures this. The game feels really simple from a basketball-sense, but forces you to think beyond just finding five guys who are good at putting a ball in a hoop.

I feel like I have the most success in DDS: PB3 when I either a) develop an overall philosophy and acquire players that match it, or b) change my philosophy to match my players. You can’t just cobble together five guys with overall ratings about 3.5 out of 5 and think you’ll win.

Ratings matter, and not just the overall rating. If you find yourself only looking at the overall rating, you’re going to get burned. You need to build a team with players that complement each other in order to be successful.

A strategy that I use is trying to always win the points in the paint battle every game. That means I favor shot blockers and strong defenders in the front court and a point guard and/or small forward who likes to drive to the hoop. I supplement this with a 3-pointing shooting specialist off the bench and a defensive specialist.

Sounds simple enough, right? Well, putting a ball in a hoop sounds simple, too. But it’s not.

Final Word
DDS: PB3 is the best professional basketball GM sim I’ve played and likely will only get better when Gorski starts releasing season disks that incorporate the full history of basketball.

Realism, immersion, easy-to-navigate and easy-on-the-eyes screens and menus, stats, and challenging AI, it’s all here.

It’d be nice to have a little more control over the in-game action and some additional data to pore over after each game. More options for customization would also probably attract more players. Those faults are hardly deal breakers, though.

Basketball GM sims might not ever reach the popularity of baseball sims, but who cares? It’s pointless to compare the two sports, anyway.

DDS: PB3 is an excellent GM sim. Period. 

Official Download - DDS: Pro Basketball 3

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 Follow more of our 2012-13 NBA Season Dynasty Blog using DDSPB3

November 1st, 2012 - Gary Gorski of Wolverine Studios has distributed his newest major release for Draft Day Sports - Pro Basketball 3. Some of the major changes of version 1.3 include a complete update of rosters for the 2012-2013 season. This includes the James Harden trade to the Houston Rockets.

In addition, Wolverine Studios has enhanced the AI logic on how they behave with restricted free agent offers. Graphics have also been improved for scoreboards.

To stay up to date on Basketball simulators, visit our forum and be prepared for a review of DDSPB3 from GM Games in the near future.

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Oct 3, 2011 - Wolverine Studios has released their version of College Basketball. DDS: College Basketball 2!