Retailers and reviewers may categorise the Championship Manager games as sports simulations but fans of the series will tell you that Sports Interactive’s games are the ultimate RPGs. No other game does a better job of immersing you in the heart and soul of its subject matter.
Someone who’s never played a game in the series would have trouble believing it, I’m sure. After all, the gameplay revolves mainly around deciphering numerous tables of statistics and watching a bunch of coloured dots darting about the screen.
But these games succeed like no other in capturing the nitty-gritty, harsh realities behind The Beautiful Game. There may be games that boast of more visceral in-your-face representations of a single match but football fans will tell you it isn’t about a single match, it’s about the entire campaign.
It’s about grinding out results for nine months. It’s about coping when the injuries pile up. It’s about improving your squad on a shoestring budget. It’s about desperate tactical moves to claw back a deficit in a must-win encounter.
The CM series simulates all that like no other game.
CM -> FM
I’ve been playing games in the series since 1996 but skipped CM 03/04 after being unimpressed with the buggy CM4. I was curious how the change of publishers (and title) would affect the latest game in this legendary series.
The answer: not much.
Football Manager 2005 is much more polished than CM4, to be sure. There are more media-related options that improve the role-playing aspect of the game but the gameplay itself remains the same and it is as addictive as older games in the series. You’ll tell yourself you’ll only keep on playing for one more match and then one more game-month and then before you know it, an entire season has passed.
(And if you’re especially poor at exercising self-control, “an entire season” might not merely refer to a FM2k5 footballing season.)
Warm-up
The game’s installation script dumped about 549MB onto my hard disk. Take note that FM2k5 is one of those annoying games that saves player-generated data into the My Documents folder. I don’t really want the My Documents folder as cluttered as Program Files.
I upgraded to the latest patch (5.02, fact fans) and the game is for the most part stable. It’s not problem-free, however, and I had one crash-to-the-desktop that made me lose two in-game months. Another patch is in the works and I’d strongly advise taking advantage of the autosave option in the meantime.
The annoyance that bugs me the most, though, is the copy protection: the game requires the CD-ROM to be in the drive when the executable is launched. I don’t know why publishers still resort to this form of copy protection. It’s easily circumvented by those who intend to pirate the game which means it only serves to inconvenience legitimate owners and exasperate them into getting a crack from the pirates.
The 69-page (indexed!) manual is the best SI have produced thus far but it’s still incomplete. The keyboard commands are seemingly on a need to know basis as the manual makes no mention of them. Is there a reason why those shortcuts have been left as a surprise waiting to be discovered?
There’s only one United
As is tradition with me, I chose a Third Division League Two side to manage my first time out. My usual choice, Torquay United, had the temerity to get themselves promoted last season in real-life so I went with Boston United instead.
I did pretty well in my first season as the Pilgrims ended up sixth and managed to win the play-offs — on penalties! — to earn promotion.
(A certain Alex Ferguson didn’t fare as well, however, and was given the boot mid-season!)
My second season was less impressive and the team soon found itself embroiled in a tense relegation battle. With little money to spend — 50k doesn’t go a long way even in Division Two League One — I had to tweak my tactics to get the most out of my substandard personnel. My assistant was convinced we were heading back to the Third Division League Two but we managed to avoid relegation with a few points to spare after some stirring fightbacks in the second-half of the season.
More of FM2k5 later.
(Assuming I manage to tear myself away from it.)
