Football Manager 2012 is absolutely, totally and utterly brilliant. I can’t imagine that surprises you much, dear reader. Football Manager has been absolutely, totally and utterly brilliant since it was called Championship Manager, and there was a Mitre Magma on the cover. What is really such an extraordinary achievement is that they really do just keep making it better and better.
I’m writing this assuming you have a working knowledge of the Football Manager series. In case you don’t, as the name suggests it’s a football management simulator in which you take on and run a club as you see fit. You handle tactics, transfers, the media, keeping your players sweet, hiring and firing backroom staff and trying to stop the board from sacking you and hiring Steve McClaren as your replacement – the ultimate ignominy.
The thing is, they put one of these out every year. This means they ask us to part with our hard-earned £30 or so for what will inevitably be an incremental upgrade on the previous year. Without the demands of a large multiplayer audience (FM does have multiplayer, but it’s far from the predominant pull to the given the time investment required), the need to have the latest and greatest version is based more on the quality of the product than it is on being part of a community who all need to be playing the same version of a game.
Feature creep is a big part of annualised sports video game franchises – every year the publishers of these games need some bullet points to put on the back of the box. According to Sports Interactive (SI), which makes the game, you would need a pretty big box in this case, being as there are apparently more than 800 new features. There’s an in-depth new tutorial system, and having played the best part of a season attempting to do a better job than Steve Bruce of managing Sunderland, I can’t say I could pick those 800 features out of a line up, but I can say that I am having an amazingly good time.
If you want a detailed breakdown of what all the new features are, I’d recommend putting “what’s new in Football Manager 2012” into Google, but what really jumped out at me were three key changes. The first of these is the most visible – the presentation of information has been fairly radically overhauled. The higher the resolution the screen you are playing on, the more information you’re given on each screen. This is particularly useful on the player information screen – having an overview with attributes, positions, contract, training, form, all displayed at once is incredibly useful and saves many a click. Each section can be clicked into for more detailed information. And my goodness, there is an incredible amount of information.
I mentioned that I haven’t finished a season yet. Sadly, unlike when CM 97/98 came out (shout out to Ibrahima Bakayoko), I have a proper job, so I can’t just sit up all night playing Football Manager. It is not just my life that has changed beyond recognition, though – it’s the game too. It takes a long, long time to play through a season. The most time-consuming period, for me, was pre-season. There is such a lot to do. Finding new staff, somehow managing to bring in new players (the improvements to scouting are brilliant), getting used to the squad, and getting used to the new tactics interface – it all takes time, but there is no doubt that it is a very engaging process. Incidentally, I managed to sign Darron Gibson and immediately changed his nickname to “The G Bomb.” This was an important step toward success. I think SI might rate him a bit higher than we do. Seeing the words “click here to view the G Bomb’s profile keeps making me laugh like the idiot I am.
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