Overall though, it was fun to play and was a quite different experience from the APBA Baseball aka “BBW” game. I believe APBA is pretty upfront that this release will have issues and hopes fans will help them work them out. I really had a positive experience with the game and think APBA is heading in the right direction. This is just a quick review since I only played against the computer and haven’t taken on a live opponent yet. I thought I would give you my initial thoughts on the game. The main chart will also tell me if a player has, for instance, struck out because of the pitcher having a quality, or if he struck out because he’s the type of player prone to striking out in general.I got a chance to try out APBA Go Online Baseball game yesterday. One glance at a card tells you all this information, instead of having to use the card many times to get a feel of what that player can or can’t do well. A Champion, for example, will hit for a better average than a player with the Sad Sack trait, a HR King will drive a pitch out of the ballpark that a Scrapper would bloop over the shortstop, and an Active runner will score more often from second and steal bases more frequently than a player with no running trait at all, and will run circles around a runner with a Stoic trait. Instead of seeing a whole spreadsheet of numbers and symbols, players are given “traits” which match up to various statistical benchmarks.

The game is a rich tapestry of various charts, but even if we just stuck to the main chart of the game and didn’t go off into various directions the game wants us to sometimes, I can know at a glance at a player’s card what type of player he is. I love to tinker with my game universe, create my own worlds to explore, and not feel like I’m stuck seeing the same things over and over again. The biggest thing that stopped me from going further in either game, though, was that it was very difficult to go beyond the confines of the cards that I owned at any given time. In the meantime, I got hooked on the MLB Showdown series for a few years, which appealed to me a bit more then because of its simple game mechanics and colorful player cards, but wasn’t really designed to be a hard core simulation.

It wouldn’t be until I was in my late teenage years that I was introduced to APBA, and while that game does much better at covering the basics of baseball, it never really captured my imagination until a decade later. My younger self, however, did not realize this, and wiled away many hours enjoying the experience. My first dive into the genre came right around my 5th birthday, when I received the Baseball Card All Star Game by Cap Toys, which changed my early collecting habits from stickers to baseball cards, but did not actually do a good job of simulating a baseball game upon even a cursory inspection by an experienced game player. I’ve been playing baseball simulation games for just a month shy of 30 years now.

Apba baseball computer game review