I've been toying around with it last night and this morning and probably will fork out the 30 clams it costs to buy the thing outright. It's faaaaaaaaaaar from perfect, but isn't the worst thing I've seen either.
Positives
---------
The "magazine" that the game produces every week is a lot more fun to read than OOTP's Player/Pitcher of the Week remarks. Basically, each 'zine looks at the hot and cold players and then shows the top rankings by a couple of stats. This is really, really cool for those of us who like to play in "God mode."
Tools-based defense. MILES better than what OOTP has. In PS, you don't play Mark McGwire at shortstop because he's got no range, no hands, and no arm, NOT because he's not rated to play the position.
Expanded roster sizes are smaller and therefore more manageable in PS. That might actually be a negative for some; for me, it's not. PS only sims one level of minors, which is all I need.
The engine is a LOT more customizeable than OOTP's. Taking a cue from Front Page Sports: Baseball (which Shaun Sullivan wrote a lot of utilities for back in the day), PS gives you a rather large XML file where you can edit year-by-year ratings adjusts, player aging and development, which attributes the AI will value the most when building a team, success rates of 1-run strategies like the hit-and-run and the steal, and a bunch more (the xml file, when loaded into Word, is 68 pages long).
The stat-generator part of the engine is a LOT more intuitive and flexible. One of my biggest pet peeves with OOTP is the "make the engine numbers go up to make your league's stats go down" bit. This actually creates two problems:
1. It's not terribly easy to grok. I just stick each year's league numbers into a spreadsheet I've created, cross-reference them with the numbers I want the league to produce, and pop the adjusted totals into the system. A lot of people who are not mathematically inclined are not going to go this route and for that reason are basically stuck playing 2005 baseball.
2. The high/low thing also means that statistically bizarre years are basically un-replayable unless you make major concessions. By "bizarre" I mean the entire dead ball era, 1930, and so on. Oh... I can sort of do the deadball era by grossly lowering Ks in the engine (and thus making them really, really high in the game), but to me, seeing Walter Johnson and co. pitch 340 innings (good) with 360 strikeouts (bad) detracts from my playing experience.
In 154 game seasons, position players have actually been seen to play 154 games!
Individual player usage logic can be accessed directly from the player's card. This makes a lot more sense than how OOTP is set up.
Silver Slugger awards! (although you can't change the names of the league MVP, Cy Young, ROY, Gold Glove, and Best Hitter (Silver Slugger) awards, which is a minor bummer).
Negatives
---------
The game takes too long to sim. I think it's because it uses MS Access as its database and so must go through the query process every single time the thing wants to think about moving a player up or down in the rotation/lineup. In any case, my somewhere-around-2-gigahertz computer took a good hour to sim out a year using the "Fast Sim" option.
There's no "restart season" button, at least as far as I can tell. Major bummer, because one thing I really like to do in OOTP when starting a new league based on a prior era is to sim a season, see how off the ratings I've created for the league are, and then adjust them accordingly. Some people like to do this several times. Well, so far as I can tell, you can't do that at ALL in PS right now.
The managerial AI is supposedly smarter than OOTP, but I have yet to see it. Actually, so far some of the stats it's putting out remind me of the goofiness you saw in v3: guys with really, really bad records pitching way too many innings or getting way too many at-bats, some pitchers throwing 100+ games a year (remember, the RECORD for games pitched is 108). A lot of this might have been my doing (I simmed a year but had all teams on Human control), so I'll reserve my final judgement on this matter until later.
The game apparently keeps track of a lot of stats, but the ones it gives you regular access to are very limited. In one sense, this isn't so bad for me; in fact, I kind of prefer not knowing what a guy's slugging average vs. left-handers is when I'm doing a fictional 1924 replay. After all, managers of the day only had a vague sense of platoon splits. On the other hand, all those extra numbers can be fun to look at at times, and right now PS won't show them.
No depth charts in PS so far as I can tell. Well, there is a cool graphical representation of the guys you've got on your team and in your system at each position, but you can't to my knowledge go in and say "I want to rest my starting LF 18% of the time vs. righties, and of that 18% I want my 4th OFer to start half and my 5th to start the other half."
On game engine issues outside of the single/double/HR/etc. modifiers, it's pretty much uncharted territory. I think the game just hasn't been around long enough for folks to figure out exactly what levels you want your starting pitchers' endurance rates to be at in the dead ball era or in the 1970s. This is one area where OOTP really has PS beat. Not to say that OOTP is perfect in this regard; there's just less stuff to get your head around.
Both games are very customizeable and both games have a sizeable fan base that enjoys modding/tweaking the game. OOTP's fan base, though, is a lot bigger and so far at least is a lot more active with this kind of thing. No Catobase for PS, for example. Example, heck... that may be the biggest reason why OOTP still roxors. Beyond that, though, OOTP's community is quite a bit bigger, for better or for worse.
Final Thoughts
---------------
In general, let me say this: this game is a lot further along than MD in particular and other OOTP fanboys in general think it is. It does several things very, very well, and since there won't be a new iteration of Markus' game for several months, we don't even necessarily need to choose between the two right now. Even when they are competing against each other, I suspect it will be more a competition for the limited playing time each text sim fan has rather than a competition for dollars; I know I could easily spend 80-90 bucks a year on two very good baseball games.
And, of course, the existence of a worthy rival is only good news for OOTP, for reasons I've already stated ad nauseum.
