Xbox 360
Just when you thought you had your social life back on track, Sports Interactive come along and ruin it all over again with their latest installment of Football Manager, FM09. Literally brimming with features, FM09 boasts an improved assistant manager advice system, transfer system, board confidence, press interaction and even, for the first time ever, the option to be a female (I know ladies, I can't believe they didn't have it before either).
While these updates work very well and will be very popular with existing fans, they probably won't entice any new ones. In fact, FM's biggest problem to date has been the lack of visual stimulation, meaning that when you try and convince a console gamer that FM is playable, they generally look at you in disgust, almost as if you've been trying to play Freebird on a real guitar. Well those days of defending the database are over as SI steps into the late 1990s with a 3D match engine! Yes! Gone are the days of a little circle being passed around the centre circle by other little circles all observed by a black circle, and even more gone are the days of plain and simple rapid-fire text and its corresponding migraine.
While the graphics are hardly Fifa, the 3D match engine is still a revelation, immersing the player deeper in match day than ever before, and allowing for a far more intuitive feel of what your players are doing. Combined with real time assistant manager suggestions, this makes for terrific in-match insight, allowing you to really get to know how your team play, or why they're not.
However, as we all know, football is a game of two halves; while the 3D engine works well, there are some minor rough edges such as my keeper, who must have to do his own washing as I have never seen him dive (even though, peculiarly enough, he still makes plenty of saves). I have no doubt that these glitches will be smoothed out in patches and updates which tend to come out of SI fairly regularly. The inclusion of interactive press conferences in which you have to answer questions from the media is a fantastic idea as it allows you to send messages to your players as well as the opposition and when you just want to play you can easily send your assistant, or go and then storm out on a whim.
While SI claim over 80 new features and updates, the most important are the ones you notice. The new press features, assistant manager feedback and the 3D match engine all add up to ensure that while everything in football seems to finish ‘at the end of the day', this game is guaranteed to keep you up well into the next, and the next, and the next. Tons of new features and a new match engine with room to run means that FM09 may not be the most polished game, but hey, while the credit crunch ensures that no one is hiring, at least Sports Interactive are still offering the greatest job on earth.