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.
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