It's not a game it's an addiction (Football Manager 2005 (PC))

Member Name: stephen_logan

Product:	Football Manager 2005 (PC)
Date:	28/01/05 (792 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great gameplay, Just about realistic stats, Pompey are in th eChampions league

Disadvantages: Very addictive, Can get frustrating, Never enough money to buy players

When, next year, I fail my degree I will be able to point to numerous problems, missing deadlines, being half unconscious during lectures and a distinct inability to convey a message properly, but the one enduring problem is this game. Football Manager 2005 is not just a game, it is a full on addiction, as much as you want to resist as much as you try to do work every time that computer goes on, there it is, the icon of dreams. Many of you reading this will be unaware of football management games, so this will undoubtedly mean very little to you, but Football Manager 05 is the ultimate, just when Championship Manager 4 looked to have reached the pinnacle, this comes out and blows it out of the water.

The premise of the game is simple, you choose a team (preferably one you support) take charge of them and hopefully guide them to glory. To achieve glory though you have to do all that a real manager must do, getting in new transfers, shedding your dead wood and making those all important tactical decisions that can sway a match. It is the ultimate in strategy gaming as it offers a type of game that most can relate to as well as being highly realistic, well at least as realistic as you can expect from a computer game. Throughout the game you experience what all-real managers experience, board and fan dissatisfaction, jubilation of victory and the misery of defeat and the defining glory of any supporter winning a major championship for your team, no matter how unlikely it is in real life.

The game is set on a huge database with the entire worlds population of footballers amateur – professional sitting around. The navigation around is simplistic but satisfactory, and whilst adjusting to the new game can take a little time once you do it’s all worth it. Match day is when it gets interesting, here you have to make all those tactical choices that you traditionally berate real managers for making. Plus as with the previous incarnation of the football manager/championship manger saga you get to watch the key highlights on a min 2d pitch, even with the option of a slow motion replay as well as various speeds on the actual highlight. I could bore the life out of you by explaining every single minute facet of this game, but lets just say if you know the games already all the features are still there, changed ever so slightly but there somewhere, if you haven’t well read the manual or just play and learn, the latter being the preferred choice. To some it may sound complicated but it is really so simple once you get the hang of it, but getting the hang of it can take a little while, keep patience it will all be worth it soon.

Football manager is pure escapism, but it’s the kind that offers the most enjoyment of any computerised game. The game sends you on a roller coaster of a journey, and trust me if you like football you wont want to get off. The new features are sparse but make all the difference, new button layouts, new training options but most importantly player pictures. Now even as a heterosexual kind of man, the one thing you don’t want in your team is ugly players, this offers you the chance to separate them fairly and justly. In previous games I would go charging in and buy every Swedish youngster praying they would become good, now with the aid of pictures (and to a lesser extent more thorough statistics) I can tell exactly where their destiny lies. If like me you’re used to the old school versions of this game, and you’re perhaps not that knowledgeable on the European and south American football scene there are some shocks with these pictures. Everything you imagine they could be, is usually so far wide of the mark, sometimes for the better mostly for the worse. I always used to buy Landon Donovan and play him with Yakubu, I did this under the assertion that they were both big powerful coloured chaps, but no thanks to FM05 I have discovered a tragic and unnerving truth, Landon Donovan is white! White?! Why? Not only is he white but also he is a skinny frail looking thing, and that is the biggest let down I've had with this game, but what a disappointment.

To invest in this game is to invest your future time in a safe place, you will be distracted for hours pulled in by the sheer temptation of the game. As a 21 year old student I read everyday how technology entraps us and corrupts us, dragging us ever closer to a fascist system of political indifference, this is what leads me to believe that FM05 is the work of a master race dictatorship, whose soul aim is to enslave the entire human race; to these people I just want to say, thank you, thank you for enslaving a million men in the most humane and enjoyable way, if I am to have my brain turn into a non functional slime, I would rather do it sitting playing this game. So you see it is a conspiracy, but it’s the kind of conspiracy that offers you something, it takes a lot but it gives it right back to you.

I feel I should spend some time talking about the features of the game, as many of you are by now properly pondering the possibility that this is just the work of a crazed madman or an overeager advertising executive. Well I'm neither, yet, so I will now explain all those little details that make this game what it is. Firstly the editor, the editor is a megalithic monolithic big thing, like all the previous monitors it has the basic outline of players and clubs credentials, which you can alter for your own devious devices. However the potential options for alterations are huge, to edit an entire team would cost a person an entire day, with the hundreds of minute options ready to tweak you are bound to get caught up in the excitement. You can change a player’s mentality, physicality and statistics, you can mould them into the player you want or the player that you think they deserve to be. For a few pure hours you get to be the footballing god, and what other game can offer you that I ask you?

I still enjoy the trappings of a social life away from my whirring computer, so I couldn’t quite claim that it has taken over my life completely. But I have increasingly realised that it creeps more and more into conversations amongst fellow respectable members of society. Enjoying a tipple in the local public house can often lead to a highly engaging conversation on new transfers and potential buys, which can often lead me to stumble home and get on the computer and try again for another 4 hours. Once you play it the game is in your psyche, as much as you want to ignore it, it’s just there at the back waiting for you to release it. I often find myself pondering my next big transfer for Portsmouth, who incidentally have just one the triple in my eight year, yes that includes the champions league, having brought in well over a hundred players I get left wanting more wanting better just wanting really.

I have rambled over this game for a long time and I appreciate by now you have probably disengaged almost completely, so it’s probably best to wrap it up whilst some of you still have the ability to look at your flickering computer screens. This game is as true to the original game as you can expect; after Eidos and SI split, it looked like the game would be buried, but this the SI game has proven that it can be regenerated and be better than it’s predecessors. It is addictive and it is as frustrating as it is enjoyable, but it is in my opinion the only game worth spending £30 on in the near future (or downloading illegally not that I did this in any way, it is a scandal to assume otherwise). The game is bigger and better than the last offerings and has led me away from the player-based games of pro evolution and fifa, to a place of enlightenment. This game offers you something that no other game can, and those who offer something similar get nowhere near to this giant. It is what it has always and hopefully will always be, a highly addictive enjoyable computer experience, buy it and enjoy (in moderation).

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