Football Mismanagement - Gamers confused

[FatherJack]

Out today is Championship Manager 2010, after a year's break, with Football Manager 2010 not out until October - which will you be getting, assuming you like this sort of thing?

Gamers appear confused with Football Manager 2009, released last November, riding high in the charts. Also Tesco seem to be attempting to shoot CM in the balls, as they label it Championship Manager 2009 in their charts and on the shelves. As it is now people see two '2009' games one at full price and one on budget and come October they'll see a '2009' and a '2010' one - in both cases it's likely they'll choose FM.

[Dog Pants]

Also Tesco seem to be attempting to shoot CM in the balls

[HereComesPete]

So which one is the good one and which one is the shit one?

Which one is the name and which one is the good bits? I can never remember and I just got asked.

[FatherJack]

Championship Manager is the name (and interface), Football Manager is the original CM team.

CM5 was the last good one, just after the split before FM got their shit together, after CM2006 lacked many features and CM2007 was full of bugs most have stuck with Football Manager.

CM didn't even release a game last year, but FM while introducing a new 3D match view had issues with activation leaving many unable to play for up to a week. CM returns with a motion-captured 3D match view, positive noises have been made, but also some videos of a spazzy AI* have appeared.

* Telling all your outfield players to stand out of the way and having your goalie take free kicks leads to all your players being marked and the GK having a free shot on goal with no wall. That's what appeared to be happening anyway, not sure on it or if it's fixed.

[HereComesPete]

Thanks FJ.

[FatherJack]

Championship Manager 2010

Tried the Championship Manager 2010 demo. The free kick bug seems to have been removed, but there is still a fair bit of spacking in the 3D view - players spinning round when lying down like they're breakdancing and running away from short corner kicks with their backs to the taker like they don't even want that horrid ball.

The GUI isn't as nice as FM, so I'll likely be sticking with that this year. Making team selections is just slightly clumsier, the positions players icons switch to when you drag them around is wooly and inconsistent and the list of sub-screens is an awkward scrolling list you have to mouseover.

The 3D view is nice with the animations better reflecting body movement when kicking the ball at (say) a right-angle, but is perhaps used overmuch with every player looking like they're training for the high jump.

Couldn't make my assistant do the team talks (may be able to, but I didn't see it) as I always seem to annoy all my players doing those. It's hard to tell which players you've substituted which makes stuff tricky in the early friendlies, where I try to give every player a run-out to assess them.

The same bug is back from CM2007 where some changes you make just prior to a match on the warmup screen (or subsequently undo) reappear back in the wrong state at half time - so you don't really know if they've been playing like that for the first half or not.

It's not broken by any means, and much may be fixed in the release version. Also the offer of 6 bi-monthly team updates (for a fiver) and the CM live component do look attractive.

In the end though Football Manager is the safe bet - they would have to try very hard to break it. I know it, and I trust it (to a degree) such that my changes do appear reflected on the pitch. FM is perhaps slightly harder, although that's probably what's known as "realism" when you always manage Coventry City.

[Sheriff Fatman]

For the two or three of us that play it; the Football Manager 2010 demo was released today on Steam.

Early reports are favourable.

[FatherJack]

Ooh. <gets>

I preordered it anyway, hope they haven't fucked it up.

[FatherJack]

Football Manager 2010

Played the Football Manager 2010 Demo last night for quite a few hours.

Signs are good. New interface but not too hard to find stuff - the settings are in the same place they always were, but getting to that place is different.

Had a couple of bugs, Defoe asked for £90 a week (instead of the £50k he was getting at Spurs) then sulked when I offered him what he'd asked for. The other is that the 'good/bad in a position' indicator sometimes falsely goes red when you're moving a lot of players around, but removing/re-adding them to the position fixes this.

Other than that, it seems fine - not sure the 'shouting from the touchline' options actually do very much, but they are meant to be a tweak on top of regular tactics, not a replacement for them.

[Sheriff Fatman]

I've come to the end of the first six months (and the demo) and have been jolly impressed. With all the changes they have made I was expecting it to be a bit buggy, but other than the contract niggles you mentioned it all works very well.

The best version they have produced for a good while.

[FatherJack]

FIFA Manager 10

Crikey, there's quite a lot to say about this if you're only familiar with the traditional management games - they've taken on a lot of the stuff that made LMA Manager (PS2/XBox) different back in the day and built on it to an almost ridiculous degree. The series has actually been going since 1997 mostly as a Windows-only product (aka Total Club Manager, F.A. Premier League Football Manager, FIFA Soccer Manager) but has been overshadowed by the big boys previously reviewed and under-marketed by EA compared to their main FIFA releases.

What LMA had was 3D match views, match analysis graphics and control over the commercial side of the football business. While it's true that all these have been incorporated into the big names to some degree, FIFA really goes to town on them.

On the commercial side you can control everything down to the number of burger vans, match-day programme quality and ticket prices - it almost feels more like Theme Park at times. You can build fan shops abroad, decide how much they should pay for their commemorative mugs and lay on transport for fan-club members. You can open youth schools in almost any town in the country you can think of, expand your stadium and other facilities, negotiate with sponsors for the kit, billboards and even the names of your stands and stadium.

All this is rather jolly, but can become tedious, so you can ask various peons to take over some tasks. Unfortunately some things cannot be neglected - for example I was warned a week before the start of the season to arrange an open day. Sadly I'd already arranged a visit to a theme park, a restaurant, a training camp, sponsor day and a "friendly" against our next opponents (where I planned to field the reserves and injure as many of their first-team players as possible) - there was no time left for an open day, and the fans hated me.

Other nice touches include a personal scrap-book (my bestest buy evar), trophy case and record of your own earnings, as well as quizzes to boost your manager rating and minigames like "guess the league table at the end of the year". Clever additions include auto-roles (ie: Captain, Corner-taker) based on stats recalculated every match and auto-substitution based on a quite comprehensive set of rules. You can also postion Widgets around your main screen, showing tables and graphs of almost everything in the game at a glance - very nice indeed. You can shift-click positions, which shows other possible players in order of form. One option is to have "an open and frank discussion with players" - this was ace, Martin Petrov glumly told me "someone has hidden my sports bag".

The 3D view is way beyond anything the traditional releases have to offer. Unsurprisingly it uses the engine from the main FIFA game, so while the players look a little uncanny and not a lot like their real-life counterparts, it is a visual feast. I can't really fault it for its depiction of events, either - something that has been a bugbear of 3D match views since ever - while players do sometimes seem a little slow to react and sometimes jog when they really should be running, it's more than adequate and the first time I've actually left the replays on. The supporters are cardboard cutouts, but I think that's probably an inside joke with EA sports crowds, because they've actually deliberately given them a small amount of depth and a cardboardy texture on the side.

But that's enough praise, now it's time for the bad bits. I'll start with the petty niggles, which are probably due to the fact it was a demo I was playing. There's no sound yet, other then menu clicks and two endlessly looping songs. They only put in the top divisions of a couple of countries - no mighty Coventry City. The game looks like a Photoshop disaster - pretend magazines with awful gradient-texture titles are juxtaposed on ropey 3D renders, and the player head & shoulder pictures are just slapped everywhere with no attention to pixellation or relative scale. This stuff will probably be fixed in the main game, though.

Sadly, I'm not sure these ones will be. When the song track changes, it kicks you out of drop-down menus. It's tricky to reliably grab players when substituting them - and that's in the nice menu you get at half-time - mid-match you get a crappy little pop-up screen at the bottom. The screen-use (at high res) is appalling - you're forced to view stuff through tiny windows that always need scrolling. You have to give up to five team talks at half-time with random results. It bitches at you for not "talking to your players", but the interface for doing so requires you to go through each player individually, rather than showing which players have concerns. You can't jump to new News messages, just scroll and click each one. The pitch-side shout-outs are all designed to be used on the fly, with shortcuts - for most you have to select a player first and at the speed you have to perform these actions (even at x1, the slowest), you almost might as well be playing yourself.

Worst of all, it had a few bugs which are a perpetual nightmare in these games. You make a change, then come back later and it's back how it was. I'd select a team, even click the little save button (not strictly necessary unless saving a permanent alternate lineup) come back later and the right back had switched with the defensive midfielder - every fucking time. It was using my assistant manager's recommendations, even though that option was turned off - I wasn't even picking the team anymore.

So, in short, which is probably all anyone wanted anyway - this is a pretty affair with some fun and entertaining options for real micro-management of a football team, but it neglects some of the core fundamentals, such as making it easy and intuitive to select players and tell them what you want them to do on the pitch.

[FatherJack]

In conclusion therefore - my selections for this year are as follows:

#3 - FIFA Manager 10 - would have made a fun console diversion, lovely-looking matches (though the viewing options lack granularity), but niggles will frustrate you

#2 - Championship Manager 2010 - a worthy attempt at a comeback, the new motion-captured 3D view is good and the tactics-generator is certainly something for the future, but like its GUI needs a bit more polishing

#1 - Football Manager 2010 - as expected, the safe bet - a few bugs but with simple workarounds - leaving the only frustration being at your players' diabolical performances

[HereComesPete]

So you're gonna play all of them then.

[FatherJack]

We need more reviews, this year-old one was still on the first page.

It's that time again, and this year there are only two choices, as there's no Championship Manager this year. I've been playing Football Manager 2011 lots since its release and am downloading the demo of FIFA Manager 11.

I didn't play the Football Manager 2011 demo, partly owing to the increasingly common and disturbing trend of demo versions being more like beta versions than representative, good adverts for the release game. There was an extremely wide-ranging release-day patch.

Football Manager 2011

Usually the safe option that they'd have to put real effort into getting wrong, it seems this year, they've perhaps misdirected a small part of their effort.

Obviously much is the same, and works pretty much how you'd expect, so I'll just go over what's different from the last release.

The match view is revamped and looks jolly nice too, especially the weather and the night games, but the variety in the stadium graphics could use some work. It's pretty much spot-on with the representation matching the text description and I haven't had any noticeable stupidities like players booting the ball out or running away from it. The players now fade from view between highlights instead of the freeze/fast-forward they used to do.
There were a few instances where players seemed to get in a bit of a loop when they were "holding up play" or deciding where to place a throw/goal kick, but that's probably just that there aren't that many frames of animation for the engine to use in those circumstances.
Like every other title ever there are sometimes quite long delays when two things happen at once - the game slows down for a key moment, but if a player the ref wants to talk to is at the other end of the pitch you have to wait for the animation to finish, even if it's off-screen.

Agents are introduced, for better or worse, adding a bit of spice to contract negotiations. The mechanics work very well, indeed the whole transfer system is just about perfect, even in leagues with fiendishly complex transfer rules, like the MLS. I haven't noticed any glaring errors and the addition of agents now reveals what would have previously seemed unreasonable demands are actually down to greedy agents.

There are some great new automation features, perhaps some of which should have always been in there, such as any pop-up confirmation boxes being told to go away after the first time. An excellent one is the option to always apply your Assistant's Recommendations to the Opposition Instructions page - this was a massive pain in the arse to do manually. Also team-talks can be automatically given - previously a bit of a morale minefield - but easily overidden to give subs specific instructions/encouragement.

The UI has always been a strong point in the series, something I thought they'd never mess up, but there are a few niggles with this new release.
One of the delights has always been that even mid-way through the match-day selection cycle or a press conference you could click on any word on the screen relating to a person, team or other game object and be taken to details, stats and anything else you might want to look at. This is mostly still true, but there are a few occasions in those instances where things that used to be clickable now aren't, so you find yourself having to use the dropdown menus and finding the data another way.
Custom views were always a bit dodgy, especially when you tried to resize columns, and this hasn't changed, but at least once you'd got a view how you wanted it, you could safely save it and re-use it again, even if you had to keep reselecting it. Sadly this is now completely broken and any custom views you make will reset to empty views when you navigate away from them, eventually disappearing from the saved views list.
Coupled with the custom views not working, there are a number of other small glitches with the list views which can make selections more trying. Each view now seems to have a default field it sorts by, so if you sort by Average Rating in the Selection view, then switch to the Contract view to perhaps flog off your crappest players, they are no longer the ones at the bottom. Additionally there are some graphical glitches associated with this, and you sometimes need to manually select a column to sort by before changing squad selections or it doesn't register them correctly.

As usual, the bugs are small things you learn to work around and this is a solid release otherwise. It's just disappointing that a couple of the bugs are new ones and that they overlap in such a way as to make it quite frustrating selecting a team you're new to and don't know the players.

[buzzmong]

It's tempting to get FM2011 for my brother for Christmas, but he's found that the last CM was far too realistic in terms of the ingame "meta" game, essentially meaning that the rest of the game is complete shit unless you start as a top 5 team.

He found in that title that you require money and prestige to get players, if you haven't got that then you can't get players, meaning you can't get money or prestige. Bit of a vicious circle meaning all the other teams are useless.

Is FM2011 actually playable on that front?

[FatherJack]

It's tempting to get FM2011 for my brother for Christmas, but he's found that the last CM was far too realistic in terms of the ingame "meta" game, essentially meaning that the rest of the game is complete shit unless you start as a top 5 team.

He found in that title that you require money and prestige to get players, if you haven't got that then you can't get players, meaning you can't get money or prestige. Bit of a vicious circle meaning all the other teams are useless.

Is FM2011 actually playable on that front?

As regards that specific point, it's tempting to say that it sounds as if he's being too ambitious with the players he's trying to sign, but it may be that in the last CM (which I only played the demo of) that the prestige system is unbalanced.

I can only comment that in FM2011, I haven't noticed it being unworkably unfair. Players typically go where the money is, indeed the game sometimes reminds you that merely improving conditions at the club is no substitute for paying them lots of money and with the introduction of agents this is perhaps more true.

Of course if you want Kaká and Ronaldo in your squad, you should pick Real and not moan if they don't want to come to Birmingham, and if you want £200M to spend on players, you should choose Man City.

Doing that is fun for a while, but isn't the reason I've been playing them for so long. There are a few ways I like to play, and all of them seem to work in a believable fashion so long as you accept the reality of the conditions imposed by the club's finances and don't set your expectations for immediate success too high.

Win everything, now
Manage a top/rich team and build a squad of the greatest players in the world, winning everything in sight. I guess this is every manager's dream, but the reality is you can only do this in the first season if you pick an existing wealthy team that has entry into the prestige competitions. If you're patient though, this can be achieved after hard work over a number of seasons at one of these other methods.

Lead your local team to glory
Pick your own club, or a favourite club and build them up as best you can using the funds you're given. The board and fans won't typically have unreasonable expectations and if you exceed them you will gradually get more funds. If you manage to qualify for a continental championship, then better players will want to join your club, even in some cases at reduced salaries. Use experienced players and hang on to your good ones, loaning out your developing players and loaning in proven ones from bigger club's reserve teams.

Turn the league table upside down
Pick a lowest-league club and win promotion as many times as you can. While this can take a long time, it's one of the most rewarding routes to success, and each promotion will see a dramatic increase in the funds you have available. Focus on your youth players and bring in free tranfers, selling the cream to big clubs, saving the money to make loan deals permanent once you've found future star players.

Career manager
Focus on your own progression as a manager, rather than sticking with one club. Pick teams that are underperforming and turn their fortunes around, before leaving and moving to a bigger club. Each success will increase your reputation as a manger, eventually leading to international jobs. From there you'll be able to work at any club in the world, with players queuing up to work with you.

All that does take time, but there are a few shortcuts you can employ to make things go a bit easier:

- When you create your manager, you can select that you were a former player at "International" level. This will increase the chances of jobs you later apply for as well as the quality of players who want to come to your club.
- Also at manager-creation time, you can select one additional nationality and language for yourself. You might want to work in England, so select England/English as your primary selection, but a good secondary choice might be Brazilian/Spanish.
- Winning a domestic cup competition often grants automatic access into a continental competition - while winning it might not be easy, you can make sure you always have your best players rested and selected for those matches. Your opposition will typically be concentrating on their league performance.
- Don't pick an isolated one-league system like Wales or MLS unless you have a number of other leagues running and plan to switch clubs later on. There aren't enough players in those league systems to draw from, very few home-grown players and those two particularly don't have a reserve or youth system either.
- When poor buy as many free, young players as your squad size allows on the lowest wage you can. Almost immediately they'll be be worth something if sold, considerably more if you give them a runout and they do well, and quite a tidy sum if they do that during a televised game. They may even end up as your star players - judge your players on form and performances, not value.
- One final trick is to "Go on holiday". For years. Probably best to do this while unemployed, so you don't get sacked and lose rep. You can just leave the game running for hours and come back and find some surprising developments. I've seen Manchester United relegated and Port Vale in the Championship. While the game is coded such that bigger teams more often see success, there is a truly random component - quite a significant one in fact - which prevents the league tables looking the same every year.

[FatherJack]

Worth noting that pretty much all the bugs I noted in my Football Manager 2011 review have now been fixed with the 11.1.1 patch.