Enter To Win A Copy Of Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2016
By Phil Watson
Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2016 has been called the best text-based pro basketball simulation game on the market. You can win a copy from Wolverine Studios, in conjunction with FanSided and HoopsHabit!
Sports text sims can change your sports gaming experience. Just ask Tim Moungey of Wolverine Studios, which has recently released its newest pro basketball sim, Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2016.
HoopsHabit and FanSided, in conjunction with Wolverine Studios, are giving away two copies of the game. Instructions on the giveaway appear at the end of this article.
Tim submitted his thoughts on the game, and the broader sports sim genre, to HoopsHabit:
By Tim Moungey, Wolverine Studios
Playing the NBA2K series has always been a joy. The increasing graphics technology allowing me to see the players much as they look in real life, being able to play out the games with near-TV quality—it’s amazing.
In fact, I can recall one time I was visiting my parents and was playing on the console I brought with me. My dad walked by and asked, “Are you playing a game or watching TV?”
But despite the glitz, I felt like something was missing. There was constant fiddling with sliders and quarter lengths, struggling to find the perfect balance of fun and realism.
Even when I hit on a set I liked, I found myself constantly playing hero ball and regularly getting players such as Kobe Bryant averaging 40 to 50 points a game.
My suspension of disbelief shattered time and time again.
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Worse, as I got older, I found my controller skills diminishing, the fun factor receding as surely and inevitably as my hairline.
I knew I was smart, but that knowledge didn’t translate into game success. Nor, as an adult with responsibilities—including two jobs, did I have time to invest in my joystick prowess.
I craved a game where my basketball smarts mattered. I longed for mimesis—an accurate portrayal and representation of hoops reality.
Enter the sports text sim genre. Computer-based rather than console, in a sports text sim you don’t physically control the players. But you’re responsible for the team building, including the roster, finances and setting strategy.
Many games in the genre also allow you to watch the game play out and make the necessary adjustments on the fly.
If you’ve ever heard of the Football Manager series (which is soccer, by the way—sorry, American football lovers), that’s an example of a sports text sim and the gold standard.
So does pro basketball—the sport I love most—have sports text sims? It does. The very best one is Wolverine Studios’ Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2016 and it is to pro basketball what Football Manager is to soccer and Out of the Park Baseball is to that sport.
I’ll discuss a few key components of text sims that differentiate them from console games and how text sims offer a far more realistic, challenging experience.
I’ll be focusing on basketball because that’s always been my favorite sport.
Roster Building
You know how in basketball console games, especially if you’re playing hero ball like I did for so many years, things like spacing don’t really matter and the overall rating is the most important element in determining how good a player is?
That doesn’t have any correlation to actual basketball reality and it’s one of the areas where sports text sims shine.
For example, let’s say you have three great post shooters in NBA2K—a point guard and two big men. No problem—you just keep working the ball inside to the bigs or drive with the point guard.
Oh, and because you control the players, you can make them your top scorers, even if you’re playing with the Miami Heat and have control of Hassan Whiteside, who has averaged 11 points per game in his career.
In real life, that would create big problems (no pun intended). You have nobody to kick it outside to for the 3-point shot and your three top scorers all do best in the paint.
Sports text sims, including Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2016, reflect that reality.
Your offense would struggle to be very efficient or rack up a lot of points because those guys would all want to go inside and you’d have no spacing. Nor can you make Whiteside a 25- to 30-points-per-game player, because in DDS at least, there’s a thing called scoring rating that determines how likely the player is to shoot.
This is another example of how sports text sims reflect reality—put a bunch of scorers on your team in a text sim and watch your offense come to a grinding halt as everyone fights over the ball. I’m sure you can think of a ton of examples from real life for this.
To give you an example, I was playing the 1976-77 season with the Los Angeles Lakers (more on historical replay later). I decided that we didn’t have the assets we needed to become a true championship contender, so I traded away Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (heresy, I know) for probably high draft picks.
I figured we would tank and hit the lottery.
Nope. While we didn’t win as many games, the coaching staff adjusted by shifting the offense to a more balanced system and we started taking more 3-point shots, rather than just constantly feeding Kareem as we did before. And we had the players to be able to make that system change work.
Furthermore, unlike in console games where they don’t really matter, you have to really pay attention to finances in sports text sims.
You can put together a great team, but it’s going to be difficult to keep them because of the money involved. For example, I can’t count how many times in Football Manager I’ve wanted to keep my top players but couldn’t because their salary demands were too high.
In basketball, you have the advantage of keeping your hotshot young players via restricted free agency, but that ties up money you may want to use to keep your other important players.
Another important aspect of team building is trades, which is my personal favorite part. It seems like every year there’s commentary about how easy the AI is to rip off in trades in console games.
In sports text sims, the AI doesn’t play.
In DDES: PB 2016, I’ve lost track of the number of times a team has told me to get lost with a trade offer that the console AI would have cheerfully accepted. It particularly pays attention to the finances of a deal and will reject bad contracts unless there’s enough else in the deal to make up for it.
That means you’re going to have to put in work to find the right deal, just like an actual NBA general manager does. In short, trading is more difficult and more realistic in a text sim than in consoles.
Historical Replay
I can’t think of a single console game that offers historical replay. Sure there are individual historical teams, but actual historical replay? Not a thing. Yet it’s standard in a lot of sports text sims, including OOTP and DDS: PB 2016.
The scope of the historical replay option will vary from game to game. For example, Out of the Park Baseball allows you to start in the early days of baseball (as far back as 1871 if you care to) and any year after.
DDS: PB 2016 currently has a start date of 1976, the year of the NBA-ABA merger, and includes the actual draft classes for every season after that. So you can play in the old days, when big men like Kareem ruled the hardwood, unlike today’s fast-paced, perimeter-oriented NBA.
You can also see how players and your league evolve and either matches or doesn’t match the actual historical results.
Personally, as a UNLV and Lakers fan, I love trying to get Larry Johnson and Stacey Augmon in purple and gold in this mode.
The historical replay option in DDS: PB 2016 also allows you to expand whenever you want (if you want to follow the exact NBA expansion timeline, you can—in fact, the game will prompt you at these dates).
Again, this is something I’ve never seen in a console game, even those that offer expansion modes.
Community
I can remember my first multiplayer experience with a sports game. It was 1997, my first year of college, and a bunch of guys in the dorm decided to start a multiplayer league of Madden. It was a lot of fun, but difficult sometimes to coordinate playing times that matched everyone’s schedule.
The same is true of today’s console games.
Sports text sims don’t have that scheduling problem. While it’s certainly possible to play out and watch the games, at their roots they are simulations, so you can just sim the games.
And because no one is actually controlling the players, even if you decide to play out the games in a multiplayer league, you don’t have to go through the hassle of figuring out schedules.
This ease of play and the limitless number of seasons that sports text sims offer has led to a strong culture of multiplayer leagues. I’ve been in them for baseball, pro basketball, football and college basketball.
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Some of these leagues have lasted literally for years, a couple even into their second decades of real-time existence.
A funny thing happens when you’re in something that long. You get to know the other people in the league (yes, we’ve had women who play) and develop genuine friendships with them. I’ve gained friends from places as wide-ranging as California, New York, Ireland, Spain, the Philippines, Slovenia and Australia directly as a result of sports text sim leagues and the communities that surround the sports text sim community.
It’s an underrated but valuable aspect you don’t often get out of sports console gaming.
Multiplayer isn’t the only community associated with sports text sim games. There’s also modding communities that offer logos, player pictures, courts and other customization to enrich your gaming experience (many sports text sims require these mods for actual team names and logos due to the costs associated with licensing).
(Editor’s note: I know of the depth and richness of this community firsthand. About a decade ago, under the forum handle of “philsgames,” I contributed roughly 500 courts to two versions of Wolverines Studios’ college basketball game.)
So if you’re looking for a more challenging, more realistic and more engaging experience out of your sports gaming, consider looking at the sports text sim genre. The game are often around half the $60 price you pay for a console game, because most of the sim games don’t pay the exorbitant licensing fees or spend tons of money in marketing.
Console games will always have their place, but for my money (literally), there’s no beating the sheer value of the sports text sim experience. To find out more about Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2016 and try the demo, visit Wolverine Studios.
So now for the giveaway. Hoops Habit and FanSided will be giving away two copies of Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball 2016 through Rafflecopter.
Winners will be drawn at random from entrants who follow the steps in the Rafflecopter. Simple as that.