Text sports games are generally a labor of love. Most sports have one or two top tier games in the genre. However, basketball for some reason rarely seems to have the depth, access, or ability to craft some of the excellent text-based simulations of its competitors. Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball attempts to deliver that experience regardless, and generally succeeds where others have failed, with only a few issues holding it back.

While the game does not feature actual NBA teams, it does offer reasonable duplicates for the NBA counterparts, as the teams have similar names and uniforms. It's entirely possible to create your own uniforms as well, and die-hard aficionados are often prone to do just that. Since every player in the game corresponds to a real player in the league, the ability to change things is available in the commissioner's menus. Although not particularly up to date with the current season, this is markedly different than most baseball simulators where players are forced to either add their own names or wait for a roster update to be released. Unlike baseball or football, where there are literally a hundred or more players and coaches throughout the organization, basketball is performed on a far smaller scale, even when taking into account development leagues. As such, it's nice to have such easy access to already known players, as most fans will know the statistical averages of players on their team without having to do extensive research.

What's here is a pretty deep and engaging basketball simulation.

The gameplay itself features a lot of the standbys that fans of the genre have long enjoyed. There are both news and magazine articles which give a bit more depth and backdrop to your team's successes or failures. You can contact agents or your team owner and have multi-branching conversations that, although lack significant depth, are engaging enough to keep gamers satisfied. Trades are as difficult as they are in real life, with the biggest issues lying in the team's ability to accept the trade with the strict cap restrictions. It should be noted that multi-team trades, such as the Celtics' huge trade this summer, are impossible here, as there is no ability to perform such a trade with more than one team.

Players, coaches and GM's do all act in relation to each other, with a bad move angering players or a great move making them happy. Unfortunately, past the news articles and the players, it's hard to gauge what anyone thinks about you. Yes, job security can become an issue if you act like Isaiah Thomas, but even in getting fired, the game sometimes seems to lack a sort of connection between the player and the text itself. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that this is essentially an entirely new franchise, but hopefully this will be something that can be corrected in the next season.

There are also a few other options in the game, which range from being a commissioner and overseeing an entire league to drawing up plays, which is great and offers quite a bit to do. Creating a play is actually fairly entertaining, as each player can be placed on a board and given specific instructions. The calls themselves are somewhat limited, with passing and dribbling consisting of most of the main options, but this ability is still a great feature. Also, the draft is fairly accurate to its actual NBA counterpart and can be an entertaining diversion while it lasts.

Technically, the game's graphics are passable, but as with most text-based simulations, it's hard to judge the game in comparison to titles that are not of the same ilk. Comparatively, there is a bit more graphical depth to other titles in the genre, such as Out of the Park, but it should also be remembered that those games are far more complicated and further along in development. The menus are all easily viewable though, without any real searching needed to find anything - assuming you know what you are looking for. Actual gameplay is nothing more then two-dimensional jerseys floating down the court, but again, that is hardly an issue in a game of this nature. The game bases its functionality on being a text-based simulation and it does that without needing to look like NBA 2K.

The graphics are nothing special, but they get the job done.

Unfortunately, there are some glaring issues that tend to pop up, making the game irritating to play at times. Menus have no auto-arrange functions, so the amount of work it takes to search through said menus is doubled for no real reason past a lack of basic functionality. Also, we occassionally ran into some errors that either locked up or crashed the game altogether, resulting in a lot of lost playtime and effort. The game also seems to be far simpler than some of its competition, but perhaps that's more a sign of its infancy than its actual quality. The music is also a bit simplistic, with only a few songs playing sporadically throughout the experience, with little to no real weight to any of them.

Part of the issue with text simulations is that they have a very specific following. Baseball is obviously a sport that tends to skew towards statistics crunching, with so many games that people don't always need to watch consistently. Similarly, football seems to work well in this context, as fantasy football players understand. Basketball, on the other hand, is far more complicated, as so much of the feel of the game lies in the connection between the players and those watching at home. Liking a team is far more dynamic, as the five players on the court can change ten or eleven times in a half, so knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your own team does not always translate into understanding another team in a different market. Draft Day Sports: Pro Basketball does well to challenge that notion though, supplying a great interface that works well within its intended purpose while ensuring mostly easy stat following for experienced players. However, for those unfamiliar with this type of game, the complexity can be a bit too much to handle. Ultimately, this is a good start for the franchise, and if you're a fan of basketball and text-based sims, this game is worth checking out.