PureSim Baseball 2005 has been signed by strategy clearing house Matrix Games. You can download a fully functional shareware version of PSB 2005 from the PureSim site. It gives you thirty activations before it stops working.

I love baseball sims. The action sports games don’t impress me very much, but give me a good baseball management sim and I’ll be happy for months. Baseball sims get me through those long winter months when the diamonds are quiet and, more importantly, let me relive the days of my youth when we didn’t worry about steroids. Yeah, there was cocaine, but the extent of its use didn’t break for a few years.

I prefer the Out of the Park Baseball series to PureSim. It’s a little more intuitive and has the fine tuning that you would expect from a series that is now going on its seventh version. Both allow you to import historical seasons from the Lahman Baseball Database, but I was less satisfied with PureSim’s replay of the 1982 season (the first I followed really closely) because Andre Dawson hadn’t hit a single home run by the end of April. That wasn’t my Hawk.

PS2005 is available for $29.95. The latest version of OOTP (6.12) is ten dollars less, though the expansion pack is another ten, wiping out the savings.