A new start in online football management

     Apart from a piece about an ill fated attempt to relive my first manager game experience, and a mention of a successful moment in another, I haven’t written about online football manager games here. Which, given that it’s verged on an obsession at times, is a little surprising. I suppose I didn’t want to admit to the addiction side of things.

     As shown by having played the original Football Manager on the Sinclair ZXSpectrum, I’ve been playing these things for a long time on and off. For the last ten years though, I’ve stuck with online versions where you get to test yourself against real people. Often many of them, and from all over the world. I never felt there was any point going back to offline versions once I’d found a decent online game. I can’t even remember the names of some of the first ones I dabbled with, but the first that really gripped me was Championship Manager Online. Sadly, that closed after a while. Although that was a few years ago, the fact that you had to pay to play seems to have been the problem, and one which has only got worse with more and more manager games using freemium systems of one sort or another. Even the masters of the offline game, The Collyers, couldn’t keep their online game going for more than a few years with a fully paying system.

     Now there isn’t a lot of choice, as virtually all the online football manager games use freemium to some degree. Most will try and keep a level playing field for all managers, but it seems to be beyond their ability to actually keep it that way. A more recent trend is to just go with it and allow the buying of success, mostly seen in facebook based games.

     Personally, for a small monthly fee, which you almost have to pay to get the best out of a lot of freemium games anyway, I’m perfectly happy with a pay to play game, as long as it’s good. Finding a good one can be a problem though. There are so many around and you can’t really see what they’re like without getting involved for a while. Then if it’s not really what you wanted you have a difficult decision on whether to stick with it (you may have liked the community within the game and some elements) in the hope it will be more suited to you in the future, or move on, having invested time, and knowing you’ll have to make the initial higher intensity effort again while learning a whole new game from scratch.

     Anyway, having played at managerzone.com and footballidentity most recently, I felt I needed to move on from managerzone. They’ve recently added U23, U21 and U18 leagues there, which suited me perfectly, as youth development had always been my strong point within that game. Unfortunately, to play in those leagues you had to pay extra for it. Given that there was already a ‘club member’ system to be paid for, an additional cast for these leagues was too much for me in a game that I’d been less interested in recently anyway. A perfect storm of both club member and Uxx league season tickets needing to be renewed, and almost having run out of the in game tokens has helped make the decision to mothball my team and move on.
     The decision to find a new game was also driven by a desire to start a game at the same time as other managers I’ve met in different games (mostly footballidentity). We’ve been playing Top Eleven, but didn’t all start together, and as we are based in different countries, have different amounts of sponsor videos to watch, which supplies you with one of the two in game currencies. Yes, it is sadly one of those ‘pay to win’ games. Not ideal then.

     If only there was place that you could go to where you could get advice on which manager game would suit you and the elements of play that you’re most interested in. Well, there almost is. I started a forum for fans of online football manager games, but have never really developed it as much as I’d have liked. Too busy playing the games instead…
     So with a bunch of us split between those still playing footballidentity, and those who had left (you actually play the matches with users as each footballer, so the time needed us more than most games), and the idea that we could find another game and all start at the same time, I went off and found as many options as possible and made a big list. There was an element of deja vu about my search, having done a similar thing whenever a game I’d been playing closed, or I just felt like a change. Three years seems to be the default period between big searches, and strangely, it seems that the bulk of what I find seems to be largely the same selection of games.
     This time though, I found one that is very new. Still in beta in fact. And in the proper sense of the term, not like the footballidentity version of ‘beta’ which it’s been in since I started playing in season 4, over three real life years ago. The game is called Football Strategy and a stated aim is to avoid ‘pay to win’ entirely. It’s early days, and hard to tell how good it will be, but it’s nice to get a group of friends into a game together at a very early stage. Hopefully the developers will stick with their intention to reset once beta is over too. A nice clean slate and level playing field combo. What more could you want?

     Now that I’ve started writing about football manager games the floodgates may have opened just a crack. There may be many posts about Football Strategy. Or whatever comes next…..

Flatout: Ultimate Carnage (Games That Rocked)

     Well, this was going to be a simple little blog post about a game that rocked my world, inspired by finding a blog which is full of tales of world rocking games, but now it’s gone and got all complicated. One game came to mind straightaway while I was reading this post about Seb Patrick’s experience playing XCOM Enemy Unknown (a guest post on Jon Gracey’s blog “Games That Rocked My World“). And that’s still the game that I’m going to write about, but the complication came when I started thinking about the group of guys I was playing it with.
     Having played games from the early 80s onwards, for a lot of that time I’d been wishing for the ability to play against the whole world. Mostly at football management games, but anything would do. By the time Flatout: Ultimate Carnage came out, the ability to play against the whole world had become the norm, and that’s what really made it such a great experience.
     As I say, I’d been gaming a long time at this point, and being able to play against the whole world could be quite sobering at times. I’m really not very good at FPS games. More disappointingly though, I found that my driving game skills were as far off the best as my FPS skills were. (Fortunately I’ve done a bit better on various online football management games.) So, having been soundly pwned by various children at various games, it was nice to find a website with a group of more mature gamers that were playing various games on different nights of the week, and seemed like a group I could feel at home with.
     And it was. I had a great time playing a fairly wide variety of games with the guys at xbox360leagues.net (RIP). There was a nice active forum on the site, and even an area for members to add blog posts, which I took advantage of. In fact, I’ve been on a bit of a nostalgia trip reading them back. And looking at the site on the wayback machine. Which is where the complication came in as far as writing this post is concerned. Yes, Flatout was amazing, particularly the first competitive night when we had a full house and had all only just got the game, but all those other games too….
     Maybe I’ll write some more world rocking game posts…

     I’ve always enjoyed driving games. Anything but drift based and I’m a sucker for it. From Chequered Flag to whatever the latest Forza or Gran Turismo is. From Mario Kart and Street Racer to whatever the latest Mario Kart is. Motorhead, Vigilante 8, Burnout variations, Motorstorm and god knows how many more, I’ve enjoyed them all.
     But with Flatout:UC and the xbox360leagues.net guys, and the start of our Flatout nights, I found the sweet spot for my driving game experiences. I suppose the mayhem levels the playing field a little for those of us that were left for dead by proper drivers on games like Forza and PGR. Actually that’s probably not true. Those guys probably didn’t join in so it’s more likely I was just the best of the rest on the basic driving side of things.
     With Flatout:UC though, there was more than just basic racing involved. I don’t mean the boosting side of things either, that’s pretty standard on games where you’re supposed to bash into each Although I have nothing against weapons in driving games, the driving and just nitro/boost system was ideal for this one. No, the driving side in those first few tournaments we had was mostly my domain, but there were also the games and the derbys.
     Within a long tournament of random events there weren’t very many derbys. Which was lucky for me as I’m not very good at them. They’re like very bad FPS games on wheels as far as I’m concerned, and as a terrible FPS player, if I could manage not coming last and at least get a point or two that was as much as I could expect. Actually, the derbys did have a selection of power ups you could grab as well. Not that any did me any good, but the one that beefed up your vehicle to do maximum damage was a lot of fun when you managed to grab it.
     The games were a whole other kettle of mad fish. I don’t think I’d even tried them before we had the first tournament night. Which is obviously not the best idea from a competitive point of view, but as I wasn’t the only one, it was perfect for comedy value. The games used the rag doll physics driver as a ball/puck/dart/stone, launched through the windscreen at the appropriate time. The driver actually got thrown through the windscreen in the racing mode too, and sometimes you could forget you were supposed to be racing as you watched him rolling down the road, arse over tit, to end up in a strangely contorted pile between some bins. Or up a tree. Or hit by every other passing car.
     The games were pretty funny anyway, but this was where having a group of you all connected, and most importantly, with headsets really came into it’s own. You could enjoy the ragdoll bouncing off the rings in the basketball all the way down and getting no points on your own. But you could enjoy it a lot more when you got to watch it happen to someone else and hear their reaction, and everyone elses. Some of the games were actually very difficult. I don’t think I ever got the angle quite right for the ski jump, and the baseball was a complete horror show.
     I think the only way to give a flavour of the games side of Flatout is with a little video:

     It’s a shame about the music there, but at least it shows all the games. I’d forgotten about the last extra bounce you could get in them as well. Very nicely done in the curling clip. It was most useful in the bowling though.

     I’m not a fan of the word banter. Or to be more precise, what it’s taken to mean these days, but having a group all together playing Flatout and having a laugh is what really made the game come alive, and is what I think of as ‘good’ banter. And it was really, really good. The most fun I’d had in gaming up to that point, and only topped by some of the matches Cydonian Knights played in their early seasons on footballidentity.com while building towards becoming a title winning side.
     A lot of the other games we competed in on xbox360leagues.net were a lot of fun too. Some with just high scores, like Guitar Hero II (which was reminiscent of the old magazine system of photographs of highest scores posted (snailmail) to C&VG, Crash, Zzap!64 etc.), but mostly with a bunch of us all in together, headsets on competing to be site champion for a week. And for me Flatout was the best of that bunch.
     One of my tournament wins: