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Football Manager 2006
At last, gamers of the console persuasion
will be able to enjoy football management like never before! Football
Manager 2006 for Xbox 360 weaves its way past the opposition and slots
one in the back of the net to complete the treble line-up for this
season. With hundreds of divisions across 50 countries, 250,000 players
and staff, the degree of depth is undeniable for even the most vocal of
rival managers!
FM2006 is a football manager game, which means you are the one to yell
and curse when the team is losing, because you are the boss! You can
take control of any team from the 50 leagues available in the game and
on top of that, there are more than 270,000 players and staff members
available. It sounds like a lot right? Wait until you learn that every
player has at least 44 different skills, in addition, there are height,
weight, age, birth city, and favourite clubs and so on. There is a lot
of data in the game and this is what helps make the feeling of realism
possible, but it also slows the game down a little, but we’ll address
that part later on.
Your job as manager is to make the team as successful as possible by
trading players, renewing contracts, making sure the players in your
team are content, set the training regiments, make sure you have
trainers and scouts and make sure your board and the fans are happy, and
so on.
The most important and hardest aspect of the game is the tactical
part. If you have a good tactic, you can win games that you might not
have won otherwise, and vice versa. To aid you, you have lots of
information, statistics, and you can also watch the games! The matches
are shown in 2D and the importance of this is not the graphics, but the
overview. Of course, most people tend to think that watching a game for
90 minutes is a bit too time consuming when you don’t get paid with
actual money, so you can choose to watch only the most important
sequences if you want.
To make good tactical choices, you need to keep a
close look on these sequences, since you can then see where your team’s
strengths and weaknesses are, and you can also look at the statistics of
the players in the current match. Let’s take an example; say you notice
that the midfielder with number 23 from Real Madrid seems to make
superior passes to the forwards, what do you do?
Maybe you should let
one of your players cover him tightly and tell him to tackle hard when
number 23 gets the ball? Or perhaps you should get a better mid-defender
in? Or even let your defensive midfielder, who can play mid-defence,
take a step down to make it harder for the forwards in Real Madrid? Many
thoughts like these will go through your head when you play the game,
and that is a good thing. The wealth of tactical choices is nearly
endless and each choice does matter – you can even see it in real-time!
This game doesn’t really need nice graphics, but the interface looks
simple and the menus are easy and logical to handle. The 2D interface
during the games works really well, although 3D might have improved the
things. The graphics are simply more than enough for a game like this.
Right after the graphics engine, there’s
the audio department. The sound isn’t the reason why you’d play a game
like this, and most people will probably tend to listen to music instead
of the in-game sounds, since the sound effects are only available when
you play matches. The effects are really good though, and help make the
matches livelier. When there are scoring opportunities for the home
team, the spectators get excited and explode when the shot beats the
keeper, or boo in disappointment when the keeper blocks the shot. It is
hard to grade the sound in games like these, but the audio (or lack
thereof) is simply great for this game.
The goal of the title is not obvious. Sure, most people want to win
everything, but if you play a lousy team in the English Northern
Conference, then your aim might be to save the club from bankruptcy
and/or from relegation. If you are managing a team from a small town,
then your objective might be to make the board improve your youth
training facilities to be able to produce players for your team and so
on. You can set any objective you want in this game, and if you are good
at what you do, you might even get offers from other clubs who want you
as their manager!
Best football management game on earth? It’s definitely in the lead for
the title, and the gameplay is what helps make it so good. The
atmosphere, the realism, the tactical choices, the beautiful goals your
players scores, etc, all aid this in making the game as good as it can
be. |
