All the talk of Solerium Infernum got me hankering for another game to play on my MacBook Pro and Vic’s being a slowpoke about releasing what I really want so I went ahead and purchased the Mac version of Championship Manager 2010. It’s downloading now.
Has anybody else been playing this one? I haven’t played a management sim in YEARS. Here’s hoping I don’t give myself a migraine learning how to play.
I’m playing it right now.
It’s okay I guess, but as the licence goes on I have a much harder time to get hooked. Maybe it’s because I don’t have as much time as I used to, maybe because I’ve been playing it on and off for more than ten year, maybe because the games are getting bloatier and bloatier.
I kinda liked the last one I tried (07), but it wasn’t the same as 00-01, but then I was a mildly depressive student far from home, and played for solid days…
I had to do a quick review of FM 10, but I’m not even sure I really got the hang of the match engine… I think they really should try to streamline the game and give a better feedback. Of course you’ve got assistants and whatnot, but they’re just a way to hide the complexity.
I guess now they’re happy to please their core community and catch newcomers with walls of fascinating states.
Maybe the suspension of disbelief is not what it used to be from my part.
Football Manager or Championship Manager? The franchise split into two when the SIGames upped and left their previous publisher (the publisher kept the name - SIGames left with the game expertise and have continued producing good games - although the game changes very little from year to year).
I mentally corrected to Football Manager, but maybe I’m wrong.
I read that they changed the development team behind CM and that it was getting better… Didn’t they offer CM 2010 for 10£ + whatever you want or something ?
Football Manager seems to get better reviews, but I haven’t played both. The guys who developed Football Manager 10 are the ones who did Championship Manager in the 90s. They had to drop the name because Edios owned it and started to use FM.
FM 2010 - I pretty much skipped over the 09 version, but really enjoying FM 2010. Match engine is much better, I was getting a lot of stuttering and issues with the little bit I played in 09.
My initial feelings is that they took 09 and refined it quite a bit to make this a very nice, elegant version.
It’s Championship Manager. After about an hour putzing around with it while only half watching my Seahawks get spanked by the Vikings, I am now in search of some documentation. This isn’t extremely “pick up and play without reading a manual” friendly.
CM10 is much better than the previous CM iterations after the split between Eidos and SI (the creators didn’t release any CM game last year so that they could focus more on making a better game this year), but the game still doesn’t hold a candle to Football Manager.
EDIT:
@Inactiviste: yep, there was a pre-purchase promo for CM where you could buy the game for any amount (with an obligatory £2.50 fee, I believe), which was a very good deal and made me buy the game. I wouldn’t, however, purchase CM for full retail price.
Like bandido I got CM10 for £2.50 in the pre-purchase deal, but didn’t really like it. FM2010, however, is pretty awesome. I haven’t had a huge opportunity to play it due to Dragon Age and MW2, but once those two have been polished off I will definitely be wasting hours of my life on it!
Bleh. I don’t know why I bother giving anything with the Virtual Programming label money. Ever. Just like the Mac version of EU3, this thing is a slug, and I’m fairly sure there’s a memory leak.
I have FM2010. It’s a great game and it is a lot better at giving useful feeback on what you are doing through your assistant coaches. I don’t really grasp the finer details of football tactics but I managed to give my team a pretty good season as a coach. What’s interesting is that I replayed that season but this time I tried my hand at recruiting great free agents from near and far, a couple of Brazilians, three Africans, and an Iranian, and while they were all better players than my regular squad I didn’t achieve the same results. Some games they played great, other games it felt like my team was just quitting on me, where my original team was able to pull off consistent results.
Yeah, the game does a very nice job of simulating the effects of team chemistry. You will get better results with a team that likes and respects each other and has great team chemistry than a team of great individuals.
It’s just one of those subtle things that make this game outstanding, and one of those things that you pick up from observing over several seasons.
My preference is to start unemployed and try to get a job with a lower league team in the UK, then see if I can eventually have a career that leads me to a Premiere League team. I’ve had some tough choices, such as taking a really poor performing team, building them into a winner, getting them promoted, developing a really strong rapport with the fans, then being offered a nice job with a higher level league team. It’s actually tough leaving the team behind, I almost feel a tinge of guilt - a sign of a very well designed game when it can tweak emotions in you!
I’m really considering getting this one (FM, not CM). I’ve played this series for the last 10 years or so (not bad for a Yank, considering I used to have to get it imported) and I really liked the series back in the 01/02 days. I have '07 and '09, but didn’t play either of them too much. I think it was really due to the complexity of the game at that point.
Back in the “old” days, I would start up a new game, grab a lower level club, download the tactic du jour (4-1-2-3) and go to town. I’d play a little more conservatively on the road, play normal at home, find a few good players and enjoy the game. I got my money’s worth.
In '07 and '09, I really couldn’t find a good tactic and I couldn’t get any real feedback on why my team wasn’t performing very well on the pitch. I REALLY struggled with that area and felt like I was bgroping in the dark to find a solution. I printed out a ton of info from the web on '09, but got burnt out just trying to reference it to figure out why my team sucked. Plus, some of it was contradictory…meh. So I don’t feel I got my time in with either version, but I didn’t have any strong desire to pick it back up again. FM is a tough game to set aside for a month and pick back up again.
So, with that in mind, what’s the verdict on 2010? Does it solve my issues with the later versions of this series?
JeffL, just curious - how in the hell do you get hired? Every time I’ve tried that, I can’t get an offer from even a Conference level UK team. I end up simulating 6 months, getting no offers and quitting.
I agree with you that FM had become a pretty hardcore game on the last few years, but my impression is that they really tried to fix that for this year’s version. The tactical part of the game is MUCH better than before, and there’s a “Tactics Creator” which allows you to easily create a adequate tactic without having to worry about all those sliders that you had to set before (you can still mess with them if you want, though). There’s also a fairly limited, but useful tool for analyzing the games of your team, which is a better way to get some feedback about your team and your results.
I also didn’t spend nearly as much time with FM09 as I had with the previous versions, but FM10 is a much better game in my opinion and I think that if you are a fan from the old days you really can’t go wrong with this year’s edition.
Football Manager, since the split away from Eidos to Sega, is still the strongest of the football manger type games. CM2010 is a vast improvement on that last 6-7 years of this series, but when SI were forced out of Eidos(in effect) they took the real meat and veg of the CM game with them, and had to rename it to FM(Eidos wouldn’t let them keep their original CM name).
So if you can get FM2010 on Mac(or PC), thats were the smart football money should go imho. I suppose since CM 02(?) the developers were completely different, had to pretty much build the following CM games from scratch, and well it just couldn’t compete for years with the genius of the series.
Atleast now it can compete, but by all accounts it still isnt as quite good as the original CM and now FM games. I play FM2007 out of preference currently, but have FM2010 to look forward to in my stocking for xmas. CM has yet to convince me it really is upto the job.
Well, I wasn’t sure about buying it, so I downloaded the demo last night. It seems pretty good. I’m getting a lot more feedback about what my squad is doing and the new tactics editor is pretty neat (with the exception that it was a pain in the ass to find where to set tactics for set pieces - that took me over 20 minutes to find). Overall, the new interface is easy to get used to and I think the overall presentation is better.
I still have problems scoring goals with my team. Now I always take a very low level squad and last night was no exception when I picked Gateshead in Conference North. But I can’t find a way to generate goals. I have some decent players on my team, including a really tall forward Armand One and some strong midfielders in Phil Turnbull and Phil Cave. But I can’t put the biscuit in the basket very often.
I did set up my attacking set piece for corners, with the 6’ 7" One and 6’ 7" Carl Jones manning the corners. But I’m still not scoring much - maybe a goal a game. Any ideas? I picked a 4-1-3-2 formation because it seemed to fit the team. I’d like to bring the ball down the sides and center it in high for Armand One, but I’m open to ideas.
Also, how do you tell which sideline touch to use if you’re just replaying highlights? I can’t tell whether to go wider, or to push the ball through the middle, or whatever. Do you all watch the games from end-to-end or is there another way to figure that stuff out?
Sounds good to me, must admit I drifted away from FM having played every version back to the original because of that. When I had to start games spending hours fiddling around with training routines (why have I got 5 coaches on the staff) just to be in with a chance of ever getting a team to perform even adequately it started getting a bit much. It lost its ability to be a game I could always have running in the background while I did other things and in some respects became too involved in many areas, especially around tactics during a match.
I was debating whether to bother with FM2010, but if it’s taken a step back towards less micro-management of every aspect of the team I’ll take another look, I miss my saturday afternoons playing CM/FM and listening to the real thing on the radio.
I don’t know if you can say it’s taken a step back. In my limited play experience (all of 1 night), all that complexity is still there. But when it comes to tactics, it’s a helluva lot easier to manage.
Your assistant can do a lot of the grunt work now, micromanaging suggestions, etcetera… makes things flow a lot easier, and keeps you from thinking that your lack of attention is gypping the team out
The micromanaging is still there - it’s just you have the option of letting your Assistant do some work, and theres now a Tactics Wizard to help with the sliders. You don’t have to do anything if you dont want to.
Of course you shouldn’t always trust your staff, especially if they’re new or just terrible.