Football Manager 2013

As promised it is time to rant and rave about Sega's Football Manager 2013.  Since my last post my steam account tells me that I have put in 68 hours on this game.  It was not because it was great, or a must buy, in fact if you do not like football/soccer I doubt that you would find it interesting. It is the business side of football, so you don't even get to play the actual matches.  The makeup of the game is: you get to pick your squad, setup training schedules, arrange friendlies, trade and cut players, as well as everything else that a manager does in real life.  The business aspect is very well done and something that makes the game feel real in a way that I haven't experienced for a while.  The interface can be translated into English, Czech, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish, Dutch, Spanish, French, and Italian, which makes the game accessible to many from all over the world.  The game starts in one of three ways, one can pick their favorite club and take them to glory, once can coach a national squad as well as a club, or one can start unemployed.  I decided to start unemployed and got a coaching job in tier 3 Norway.

The game is fun and sucked me into it like I did not think that it would.  I played through three seasons and ended up staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning on many occasions.  The newness of the game has finally worn off and I am able to get some sleep once again.  Now time for my good, bad, and ugly that I started with the first game I ever talked about on this blog.

The good:

Immersion- you can take a club from the bottom tier to the top.  The game has almost all the tournaments that real life has as well as the possibility for international call ups during federation cups and world cup play. The transfer window is only open during the actual time for the league that you are a part of and if you want to bring a player from a country that your nation does not recognize they must obtain a work permit before they can play for you.  (I have had three transfers declined because the Norwegian government would not allow a work permit for the players, very upsetting when you have spent three game weeks negotiating with agents for this player.)

Database- I am playing on medium database and have over 50,000 players that are in the database.  I even looked for random youth and reserve players that nobody really knows and was able to find the actual player.  Very impressive for the ultimate coaching experience.

Game Play-  Pretty easy to pick up, yet there are a lot of things that I still have not learned about or utilized.  (Good thing I am still playing tier 3)

The Bad:

This might be a first but I have nothing that goes into this category.  It is a solo game so I can't even complain about trolls in this section so I have to give it a stamp of approval for not having anything in the bad section.

The Ugly:

Processing speed-  I put this here instead of in the bad because it takes a lot of time to manage all the job opportunities, games, player moves, and general news to come up on the computer screen.

Match View-  If you want graphics on par with what is coming out right now this is not something that you would like.  I have seen better soccer game graphics on a virtual Foosball table.  Not a highlight, but the pixelated players are good enough for the player to understand what was going on and how to make changes to his/her tactics in order to improve or decimate chances of success.

Funny moment in real lower tier football

Game Trailer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcyHvtTqcd4

I would recommend this game to the soccer nut who thinks they can do any head coaches job better than the real person.  I will continue to play this game and may even try and achieve glory.  

Good luck to all you future or current managers out there and I hope that you have a lot of fun building your team from the bottom up.

*Just learned from a friend that this game has a tool from steam that allows you to change the database and create your own team, I haven't played around on this but I will let you all know how it works if I ever get around to it.

**sorry for any spelling mistakes I was listening to a Danish morning show on the radio while writing this and was having a hard time going between the two languages.  I probably would have written this in Danish but I am not yet proficient enough to do so and make it pass.  If you want to listen to the station I was listening to you can go to:   www.anr.dk   and click on (lyt om anr) under the radio tab.  It is a fun mix of pop and top 40 music.    (There I gave you my plug maybe you'll get some more listeners....... or not....)