Eat My Goal (LMA Manager 2001 (PS))

Member Name: fluffypup

Product:	LMA Manager 2001 (PS)
Date:	15/07/01 (756 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Realistic, Stadium Builds, Great management control during games

Disadvantages: Joypad control, 15 space saves, Time consuming

Bored with the summer recess and lack of football? Depressed that Match of the Day isn’t on any more? What will you do without John ‘Mottie’ Motson’s warbling commentary or the lack of Andy Gray’s statistics for a whole three months? Well hooray for Codemasters! They’ve brought out LMA Manager 2001, the latest in their range of football management games. Will it be ‘eat my goal’ or is it another damp goalless bore?

LMA Manager is a huge game. The music ‘Eat My Goal’ gets you going right from the start. The graphics are impressive and it has a warm feeling that… maybe just maybe, this could be the season for us! You have the options of starting in either the English or Scottish divisions. Maybe next time the good guys at Codemasters could have also considered a European option? You have the option of picking any team from the chosen divisions. I say you, but really it’s a team effort because you have a huge back room staff – assistant managers, scouts (football scouts not the little green boys singing around the camp fire), marketing manager, physiotherapist and trainers and tea ladies (I jest) etc.

You start off with a full team of players plus a young team who you can promote to the senior squad. That’s if they cut the mustard or if you need a stand in if your star player needs to go and do a shampoo commercial or two. You and your trainers can pick the individual formations (based on famous team of the past and present), individual and team training and pick out specialist roles like captain, man marker, playmaker, free kick taker etc.

Hooray for email! That’s how people communicate with you in this game. It’s a welcome end to the use of the back pages of the newspaper and telex malarkey because this game has entered the 21st century. Examples of are getting reports on players and teams from your scouts, when players have signed or maybe if yo
u’ve won a manager of the month award.

The transfer market is quite good and realistic. It is guaranteed that every footballer in every division including the European clubs are present. On the transfer market the players are listed by skill level, rather than the team they play for or availability of transfer status in other games. This makes searching for the best players really easy, rather than wasting your time searching for the best players. Expect to pay upwards of £32 million for the top players, that’s if their clubs want to release their best assets. You start the game with £50 million if you start from the Premiership. The top European clubs don’t like losing their best players which more than can be said for the British teams! You can transfer list, loan or make players become free agents. Unfortunately you can’t sack players, so you have to wait until other clubs come in for them. This can be frustrating, as you’ve got loads of rubbish footballers wasting money each week sitting on the bench all the time. Maybe LMA ’02 will introduce this feature!

You get an objective when you take over a club: promotion, avoid relegation, win a cup or qualify for Europe If you fail it’s a good chance you’ll be getting your P45 and ending up as one of Tony’s 1 million. You get continually assessed on your managerial skill throughout along with the support (or lack of support) from the directors and supporters. It doesn’t matter if you are winning every game but if you transfer list the fan’s favour player they don’t like it! The directors also don’t like you free transfer listing all the duff players, even though it would mean saving loads of wonga (money)!

A really brilliant feature of this game is the chance to either modernise or completely rebuild your stadium. How many tiers do you want? Do you want corners? What style of terracing do you wish? Do you want cor
porate hospitality for the prawn sandwich brigade? It makes this game rise well above the likes of the Premier Manager series of games where you had no choice of stadium design. You also restricted to a budget on how much development you are allowed. This also applies to player and staff wages. If you think you can tempt David Beckham to your team with £200K wage a week you are jolly well mistaken!

Playing the game is also quite cool and addictive. You can chose whether to just get the results (which is my favoured option as its quicker), only get the highlights of the game, or actually watch and manage the game as it happens. Watching the game give you great control of how your team plays. Other football management games only allow you to play in a given formation and type of play. LMA ’01 allows you to interact with the players. This allows you to call out and control the type of play – defensive, all out attack, passing game etc. It works pretty well but the AI (artificial intelligence) isn’t all that it could be, or maybe all my teams pretty pants (rubbish).

The graphics are good when playing the full game. The players are well drawn and flow pretty well for a football simulation. You get the flashy graphics on an electronic scoreboard every time there is a goal. Unfortunately, when you concede goals you have to put up with them because you can’t key press them away!

LMA 2001 gives you an array of statistics. These are well presented and laid out, with a few neat graphs thrown in for good measure. You have the option of scrolling between the league tables, top goal scorers, wins & losses charts, best players of the last league game and the highlights and stats for the last match played.

The controls are quite cumbersome in comparison to playing the game on the PC. Scrolling between the different options and sub-options are done via the L1-R1 and L2-R2 respectively. This can get quite frustrating at time
s. Examples can include when you want to check your email and end up looking at the transfer list all the time. Or you are continually scrolling with the left and right arrow to enter a very low or high price. It can get damn annoying, but it isn’t the fault of the game makers but just the format of the machine!

The football management simulation is realistic, fun, addictive and very time expensive once you get into it. Playing with just the results can take around 5-6 hours to complete just one season. A disadvantage with this game is that it requires 15 spaces on your memory card. No you can’t delete other previously saved games from it when you want to save your game. Another good feature is that you can save your team. This allows you and a mate to play challenge matches against each other’s teams. I haven’t tried this option as I’ve lost all my friends playing this game all the time! : (

Codemasters have come out with a top quality polished football management simulation. Its advantages are that the game play is good, realistic and certainly no wall over. You can shout out tactics to your players from the bench and automatically change the play rather than pausing the game like other games. The stadium build is top notch and you can rebuild your very own 100,000-seater stadium in less time that applying for a Government grant to rebuild Wembley. The disadvantages are the controls are done with the keypad that makes scrolling between options and entering cash amounts tiresome and frustrating. Also the save feature requires far too much memory space.


LMA 2001 is a great football management game for the Playstation (PSX). I personally prefer to play this type of game on the PC rather than the PSX. It’s easier to control the game with a mouse and enter monetary values from the keyboard than from the scrolling with the joypad!! It’s a definitely ‘eat my goal’ rather than a damp goa
lless bore! Buy it!


PS…

If you get bored of losing all the time or constantly run out of money then there are a good selection of cheats available: £500 million, team will never lose a game, quick stadium build, fast recovery from injury etc. I won’t reveal the codes but they can be easily found by doing an Internet search. I strongly advise you not to use or search for these cheats until you have become bored of the game. When you do use these cheats you instantly lose the challenge of the game. I only started using the cheats because I wanted great time in my life to do other things than be glued to the playstation playing this highly addictive game!

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