CPB2 (中華職棒 II) DOS

Take baseball and localize it to Chinese — that's a brilliant clue that this isn't about American ballparks, but Taiwan's professional league. CPB2 is a managerial quest for the title, where you sit in an office, drill training camps, buy players, and watch your team battle the rest.

It's a classic sports simulator from the era when such things had spreadsheets instead of graphics and measured success by the number of menu clicks. You build your roster, set tactics, run games, and wait for results. Baseball here isn't a virtual spectacle — it's a numbers game. Outcomes develop according to stats, not animations. It makes things simple, but without personal insight it's hard to understand what's actually happening.

Controls are typical for DOS in the mid-to-late '90s — menu, submenu, even more menu. Cursor, Enter, Page Down, back. Without a mouse it's a marathon. With a mouse it's still tedious, but at least fishing through lists goes faster. The mechanics themselves aren't bad — there's logic in them, depth, a sensible economic system — but without central visual motivation it stays pure administration. Playing something that happens in spreadsheets and text only convinces those who are happy with a calculator and score totals.

CPB2 is among those games that were huge hits at home but arrived in Europe at the moment when similar games were already being made with graphics and animations. Still, it has merit — for Taiwan baseball fans it was what Baseball Mogul was to Americans. Today you look, recognize it's honest work, and then move on.

If you enjoyed poking spreadsheets or you're a fan of older management sims, try it in an emulator. Otherwise it's more curiosity — interesting for where it came from and who it was for, not how it plays. Chinese in the title promises an original perspective, reality is much like every other spreadsheet baseball simulator. Just in a different language.