Slipperduke
The Camden Cad
When I was young I used to dream, not of a career in professional football, or of great riches or even of a date with Kim Wilde. Nay, those were the dreams of weaker folk. I dreamed of a portable 'Tracksuit Manager', that mid 1980s Spectrum classic. I dreamed of whiling away long car journeys to wet camping holidays by sending my own imaginary football teams into battle. Not on something as cumbersome as a laptop, which was handy as they hadn't even been invented then, but with something handheld. Something convenient. Something simple.
Now today's generation of football-geeks can live my dream and, rather fortunately, so can I. ‘Football Manager’ has been released on the iPhone. I have an iPhone. I also have a lot of long journeys and I have £6.99 in my bank account. Just. This, truly, is a beautiful day.
But here's the bad news. iPhone FM is not as playable, immersive or as genuinely awesome as the original FM. That much was always obvious though, wasn't it? I mean, you didn’t really think that it was possible to cram the most stat-tasmic game in the history of mankind into something roughly the same size as a credit card, did you? This is after all, a medium of gaming not that many years beyond the halcyon days of 'Snake'.
Faced with the knowledge that they couldn't possibly do a direct conversion, and aware of the crime against humanity that was iPhone ‘Championship Manager’, Sports Interactive did the sensible thing and stripped their masterpiece down to its most vital components . Phwoosh! Out go concurrent leagues. Be off with you, tactical sliders! No more sweeping attribute panels with more personal information on your players than MI5 could ever hope to garner. No more 3D match engines, no more personal instructions and no faffing about with U18 squads. This is a far simpler affair, closer at times to the older incarnations than the new souped-up 'Sega' versions.
Gameplay can be fiddly, especially when you've got sausage fingers like me and you find even the simple act of dialling on an iPhone to be as technically challenging as a moon landing. Picking a team manually can require the desterity of a heart surgeon, especially if you're playing on a bus or on the tube. Thankfully, they’ve installed a drag'n'drop option which allows you to simply splodge your digit on the player name and greasily swipe him into position. Easy. Tactics are even more straight-forward. Simple multiple choices suffice here. Attacking. 442. Committed Tackling. It's just like Championship Manager 01/02, the most palatable of all the vintages and a game that cost me two girlfriends, one job and a kitten*. It turns out that they can’t open tins of catfood on their own…How was I to know?
Don’t think that SI Games have scrimped on detail though. There are still several pages of statistics on each player as well as the usual indicators of mood and form. All your Opta-style numbers are available, telling you passing accuracy, shots on target and physical condition. This can be more of a curse than a blessing though. It’s not easy to bound around a big squad, quickly comparing attributes, and there’s no way of lining them up in order of, say, finishing, like you can on the big version. That said, once you know who’s who and who does what, you don’t need to keep such a close eye on things. A handy button at the bottom allows you to pull up the vital numbers (average ratings, fitness, goals, etc) without too much hassle.
Actual matches, on my piddly 8GB iPhone at least, aren’t worth watching. You’ll get more out of the commentary and the stats than you will from a flickery screen of dots attacking each other. It’s hard to shift players as easily as you can on the main version. My first game saw my centre-back dismissed after ten minutes, but for the life of me I couldn’t find out how to take the usual action of pulling off a striker for a defender and dropping the new man into the back-line. I am as thick as a treestump with these things though, so let’s not worry too much.
The acid test of these games, however, has always been in the mind. How do they grab you? How do they obsess you? The full version of Football Manager 2010 makes me do press conferences in my head. That’s how a game should be. It should make you lie awake at night cursing your reluctance to strengthen in the summer. You can’t expect that much from a mobile game, but that doesn’t mean you have to put up with any old rubbish.
The iPhone version of Championship Manager made me want to remove my eyeballs with a rusty dagger and pour vinegar into the vacant sockets until I’d learned my lesson. The iPhone version of Football Manager is an engaging diversion, it’s suitably addictive and it’s fun. You can trust that your decisions have some bearing on the outcome, you can enjoy the gameplay and you can rely on it to distract you for long enough to make the £6.99 seem like an absolute bargain, rather than the most you’ve ever paid for an App.
When it comes to a full-blown, number-crunching statistical meltdown with an accurate and enthralling match engine that will have you leaping out of your seat in joy or collapsing to your knees in despair, I’ll be sticking to the full version on my laptop. But, look at it this way. I’m eight games through my first season at Southend. I already know that I’ll be playing it on the way to work tonight, and probably on the way back too if the battery holds out. I’m fairly sure that I’ll be playing it next week as well, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I was still clattering away with it throughout the summer. For the price of a couple of pints, that’s not bad at all.
* - Not really. Come on, do you really think I’m the kind of person who would let a kitten starve to death? I shot her when she kept mewing during my FA Cup Final.
Now today's generation of football-geeks can live my dream and, rather fortunately, so can I. ‘Football Manager’ has been released on the iPhone. I have an iPhone. I also have a lot of long journeys and I have £6.99 in my bank account. Just. This, truly, is a beautiful day.
But here's the bad news. iPhone FM is not as playable, immersive or as genuinely awesome as the original FM. That much was always obvious though, wasn't it? I mean, you didn’t really think that it was possible to cram the most stat-tasmic game in the history of mankind into something roughly the same size as a credit card, did you? This is after all, a medium of gaming not that many years beyond the halcyon days of 'Snake'.
Faced with the knowledge that they couldn't possibly do a direct conversion, and aware of the crime against humanity that was iPhone ‘Championship Manager’, Sports Interactive did the sensible thing and stripped their masterpiece down to its most vital components . Phwoosh! Out go concurrent leagues. Be off with you, tactical sliders! No more sweeping attribute panels with more personal information on your players than MI5 could ever hope to garner. No more 3D match engines, no more personal instructions and no faffing about with U18 squads. This is a far simpler affair, closer at times to the older incarnations than the new souped-up 'Sega' versions.
Gameplay can be fiddly, especially when you've got sausage fingers like me and you find even the simple act of dialling on an iPhone to be as technically challenging as a moon landing. Picking a team manually can require the desterity of a heart surgeon, especially if you're playing on a bus or on the tube. Thankfully, they’ve installed a drag'n'drop option which allows you to simply splodge your digit on the player name and greasily swipe him into position. Easy. Tactics are even more straight-forward. Simple multiple choices suffice here. Attacking. 442. Committed Tackling. It's just like Championship Manager 01/02, the most palatable of all the vintages and a game that cost me two girlfriends, one job and a kitten*. It turns out that they can’t open tins of catfood on their own…How was I to know?
Don’t think that SI Games have scrimped on detail though. There are still several pages of statistics on each player as well as the usual indicators of mood and form. All your Opta-style numbers are available, telling you passing accuracy, shots on target and physical condition. This can be more of a curse than a blessing though. It’s not easy to bound around a big squad, quickly comparing attributes, and there’s no way of lining them up in order of, say, finishing, like you can on the big version. That said, once you know who’s who and who does what, you don’t need to keep such a close eye on things. A handy button at the bottom allows you to pull up the vital numbers (average ratings, fitness, goals, etc) without too much hassle.
Actual matches, on my piddly 8GB iPhone at least, aren’t worth watching. You’ll get more out of the commentary and the stats than you will from a flickery screen of dots attacking each other. It’s hard to shift players as easily as you can on the main version. My first game saw my centre-back dismissed after ten minutes, but for the life of me I couldn’t find out how to take the usual action of pulling off a striker for a defender and dropping the new man into the back-line. I am as thick as a treestump with these things though, so let’s not worry too much.
The acid test of these games, however, has always been in the mind. How do they grab you? How do they obsess you? The full version of Football Manager 2010 makes me do press conferences in my head. That’s how a game should be. It should make you lie awake at night cursing your reluctance to strengthen in the summer. You can’t expect that much from a mobile game, but that doesn’t mean you have to put up with any old rubbish.
The iPhone version of Championship Manager made me want to remove my eyeballs with a rusty dagger and pour vinegar into the vacant sockets until I’d learned my lesson. The iPhone version of Football Manager is an engaging diversion, it’s suitably addictive and it’s fun. You can trust that your decisions have some bearing on the outcome, you can enjoy the gameplay and you can rely on it to distract you for long enough to make the £6.99 seem like an absolute bargain, rather than the most you’ve ever paid for an App.
When it comes to a full-blown, number-crunching statistical meltdown with an accurate and enthralling match engine that will have you leaping out of your seat in joy or collapsing to your knees in despair, I’ll be sticking to the full version on my laptop. But, look at it this way. I’m eight games through my first season at Southend. I already know that I’ll be playing it on the way to work tonight, and probably on the way back too if the battery holds out. I’m fairly sure that I’ll be playing it next week as well, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if I was still clattering away with it throughout the summer. For the price of a couple of pints, that’s not bad at all.
* - Not really. Come on, do you really think I’m the kind of person who would let a kitten starve to death? I shot her when she kept mewing during my FA Cup Final.
