There’s been only one other football game on my mind this week: Football Manager Live. Just over a week ago I joined the game as a Beta tester—one of thousands, it seems—and I’ve been playing it ever since with delight. Not just enjoyment: delight.

Delight is a whole other quality of enjoyment when it comes to gaming. Delight is the mysterious X-factor that transmutes ordinariness into excellence. Delight is what I get from games like PES, Bioshock, Final Fantasy, Portal, Metal Gear Solid, and many others.

I’ve always enjoyed the Football Manager games, but FM Live takes the game to the next level. It really does make a difference watching those little circles run around the virtual 2D pitch when you know there’s another human manager watching the same action from the other team’s point of view.

FM Live is deep, but here’s the thing: it’s as deep or shallow as you want it to be.

I’ve spent three-quarters of my cumulative time logged in (about 6 hours in total all week) just tinkering with my team, my tactics, my formation, and my skills training. One of FM Live’s innovations is that you no longer spend time training your players, adjusting sliders and slotting in various coaches to various roles. All of that has been dispensed with for the online version. Instead, you train yourself. For example, you self-train your coaching skills, step by step, and each new level of the skill has a proportional effect on your players. Within coaching skills there are numerous sub-divisions: goalkeeping, defending, and so on. Each skill takes a proportionally longer time to train. Coaching level 3, for example, which I am just about to start, takes three-and-a-half days to train. That’s real time. The training continues even when you log off. You get emails informing you when the training is finished. It’s all very immersive.

You also get emails letting you know whether your bids in the transfer market have been successful or not. The #1 piece of advice I would give to any new player of FM Live, now or in the future, is: make sure you’re able to watch the end of any transfer auction. Most auctions last 24 hours. Several times I’ve placed bids for players and logged off happy that I’d have them in my team the next time I played. But then I’ll see that someone else sniped me, eBay-style, at the last moment of the auction, and did so by bidding £1 more than me. It’s frustrating and I’ve missed out on so much good talent because of it.

The competitive league season started at the end of the week. I’ve played five games so far, live against other players, and am not doing very well. My record is something like played 5, won 1, drawn 1, lost 3. I’m just below mid-table in my league of 20 teams. Most of the other players have played an equal amount of games. You have to play a certain quota of games within 4 days or so of the fixture becoming active, or the AI will play the games for you. It’s the way it has to be. And it works incredibly well.

It only takes about 10 minutes to play a game on FM Live. In an hour-long play session you can easily fulfil your live games quota for the week. Of course this depends on the other players being online as well. So far that hasn’t been a problem. Time will tell if it becomes a problem as any novelty wears off. I predict that in the future there will be a hard core of regular loggers-in, and it should be possible for them all to identify each other and set up their own regular leagues. Less committed players won’t be excluded and will have their own leagues too.

I’ll make another prediction here: FM Live will become one of the biggest MMOGs on the whole internet…

A brave prediction given that I’ve only played a Beta version for about 10 days, but I think it’s a no-brainer of a prediction. It’s based on the biggest sport on the planet, it has an existing userbase in the offline FM games, it’s accessible, immersive, flexible… what’s not to like?

It’s been an interesting couple of days on the PSP version of PES2008. I haven’t even been tempted to go back to the PS3 version, and I don’t think I ever will go back to it. I gave the next-gen version a much greater chance than it ever deserved.

The so-called last-gen version of PES is the true version. It’s where the action will be, if it’ll be anywhere, from now until PES2009. (And if PES2009 is just an updated next-gen PES2008? I don’t even want to think about it.)

I regret starting my PSP Master League on Top Player. Last-gen PES2008 is a wholly different game from next-gen PES2008—different passing, different shooting, different tackling, different through-balls. Everything is different. I already knew this before I started, but after playing a few warm-up games I confess that I thought I could handle it.

I’m not handling it at the moment. I’m mid-table (in a league of 12) in the middle of my second season. I get pummelled in every game, lose most of them 1-0, and have only scored about 6 goals in an entire season and a half so far!

The CPU seems to be extraordinarily aggressive in PES2008. It’ll snap at any loose balls, regardless of whether you have a player in between or not. It’s also pretty skilful, and has scored some great goals. I rarely post CPU goals on this blog, but I had to post this one:

A 35-yard volley from a cleared corner. I’d have been proud of that goal. The CPU scores long-range shots against me for fun in the PSP version of PES2008—something I am very happy to see. The better the CPU opposition, the happier I am, and the more longevity the game will have.

There are some downers. Here’s some shocking collision detection, as showcased by my goalkeeper:

What’s remarkable about this clip is how unremarkable this kind of thing has come to seem. Collision detection in PES2008 (all flavours) is as bad as it has ever been in the franchise’s history. When did PES players just start to accept things like this as being normal?

———————-

The competitive league season of Football Manager Live (Beta) has started today. I’m about to play my first proper game, after several days of largely meaningless (but useful) friendlies.

My team’s profile in the game is pretty poor. Most of the other new players were cannier than I—they spent a longer time exploring the menus on Day 1 of the Beta. FM Live uses a database of real players, not made-up ones. Everyone else found all the good players before I knew where to look. I played a friendly last night against a guy who had David Beckham and Gilberto in his team, among others. My best player is a non-entity striker called Robbie Simpson. It’s still too early for me to know how I can go about catching up, but I’m sure there is a way.

POSTSCRIPT:

Doh. The season starts tonight, not this morning. I won’t play my first proper game until tomorrow morning, Thurs 6th March. FM Live features a host of playing options suited to the time of day you can play. Due to my working hours and other commitments, I joined a daytime league where I can play all of my games in the mornings.

When I was logged on just now I took the opportunity to play another friendly. I was 1-2 down going into the last few minutes. I rejigged my formation to beef up the midfield, and instructed my players to start thumping long balls into the box. It worked, and I came away with a 2-2 draw despite being the inferior team. I think I am going to love FM Live.

The only meaningful other football game action this week has seen me starting out as a Beta tester on the forthcoming Football Manager Live.

I’ve done a little bit of Beta testing before, a year or so ago, on a game that never made it to full release and lost its makers tens of thousands of pounds. I hope that isn’t an omen…

But I think FM Live is a vastly safer prospect. Here’s a fansite. There’s a ton of screenshots here for the curious to look over. There’s also an FAQ in case there’s any doubt about it….

Yes, this is an MMOG based upon football management. I’ve played plenty of browser-based football manager games, and none of them come close to FM Live. A dedicated, fully-featured game for this kind of thing has been long overdue.

I’ve only had time to play FM live for an hour or so per day so far. Before installation, the game asks you what kind of FM Live player you think you’ll be—Casual, or Intensive? Casual players are those who would play for 1-5 hours per week. Intensive players are all those who’d play for 6+ hours per week. (I know, that seems a little low for ‘Intensive’; they’ll probably need to introduce an Intermediate level.)

You’re then placed in a game world with other players of a similar disposition. I selected Casual. I doubt I’d ever be able to play FM Live for more than a couple of hours per week. This is an important element of the game for its makers to get right. When you’re not logged into the game and your team has to play a match, an AI takes over for you and controls everything that happens within the game (while respecting your formation, selection, and tactics choices, naturally). Putting casual and intensive players together would favour the intensive ones to a massive degree, as they’d be more likely to be logged on and able to make the kinds of changes during games that an AI never would.

I’ve only had time to play five friendlies so far. The main competitive season doesn’t get underway until Wednesday 5th March. That’s when I’ll see what FM Live is really made of—although the friendlies alone have whetted my appetite to a massive degree. It’s peculiarly exciting to play a Football Manager match on that famous 2D pitch against a human player in realtime. You wouldn’t think so, but it is.

One thing I have noted so far is that there don’t seem to have been any compromises made with the core Football Manager gameplay. It’s still as formidably deep as ever—you could spend your entire logged-in session just perusing your own players’ stats and analysing who should play where. It might have been tempting to dumb down the franchise for its MMOG version, but no—it certainly hasn’t been dumbed down.

Example: in my last friendly I was losing 2-1 and then I had a player sent off. It was still early in the first half and I quite reasonably, I thought, decided I needed to try for an equaliser before half time, then play ultra-defensively in the second half and try to hold on for the draw or snatch a winner myself.

So I immediately switched formation from my starting 4-3-1-2 (a solid FM formation) to a ridiculous 2-4-1-2, with both full backs pushed up into midfield. That’s the kind of thing that people might be tempted to try in a computer game (I was), but FM is more than a computer game, as its many addicts will testify.

I conceded another 5 goals and lost 7-1. I only stopped conceding goals late in the second half when I switched back to a sensible formation—a sturdy 4-3-2 that I should have gone with from the moment I went down to ten men. The lesson here is that FM Live, like its single-player predecessors, is not a game that can be taken liberties with.