Football Manager Live First Impressions

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Live is, of course, Evil spelled backwards. It starts to make more sense. Sadly, the best anagram of Football Manager I could come up with was 'Fab Goal! Loan term?' which is yet more evidence of the game's hidden intent. Just ask Paul Collyer. Miles Jacobson's dodgy Watford connections become even clearer once you re-arrange the letters to spell 'Fab goal. Ram Elton'. I'll stop now before it gets messy, or worse, sued. [Or even worse, edited out. - Ed]

Lining up together at a press conference for the first time, founders Paul and Oliver Collyer sit alongside beaming studio director Miles Jacobson, and proceed to rib each other throughout the least corporate demonstration of a videogame that you're ever likely to witness. Football Manager Live is about as simple an idea as possible: it's a fantasy football MMO with an eBay-style auctioning system, and nicks the best bits of the parent game we all know and love.

Tempted out of retirement

The brainchild of fellow darkening ginger Oliver 'Ov' Collyer, the other less outwardly evil co-founder of Sports Interactive, who returned from his globe trotting travels with an MMO plan to shake up the football management status quo. Acutely aware that many long-term Football Manager players were finding their life situation changing (marriage, kids, heavy duty life-sapping jobs, etc), Sports Interactive began thinking of how to bring those lapsed players back into the fold - while also creating the kind of expansive world that hardcore players could utterly lose themselves in. Welcome to your bosom, Football Manager Live.

In development for two years, and in Alpha since last autumn, a team of just four core SI staff have been beavering away on the PC and Mac alpha versions of the game, and already the game is in a fully playable state. In a remarkable gesture, Sports Interactive gave attendees to the press conference full access to a working version of the game, despite being 11 months away from launch. Refreshingly keen to get core members of the press involved at an unprecedented early stage, the hope is to gather as much feedback as possible, iron out all the kinks and deliver something that players will want to subscribe to over a long period of time.

"Rather than you all just going away and regurgitating the press release, we thought we'd give everyone in this room a chance to play it so you can make your own mind up about it," says Jacobson. Such generosity isn't misplaced confidence, either. In short, the game works a charm already, and even at this embryonic stage it offers an excellent insight into a project that has the potential to be even more successful than its parent game.

But these are still very early days, and there's an awfully long way to go before we can fully digest its long-term appeal. In the middle of next month, the game moves into a lengthy beta test phase, where 1000 members of the community (and competition winners) will be able to sign up initially (via the official website). After that, it's "likely" that more spaces will be made available as they ramp up to the spring 2008 release, so don't worry if you don't get a place initially. The game's development, according to Jacobson, is "proactive and reactive... community driven", and that concept alone gives you an insight into why SI is so keen to make it the product that the players want, as opposed to the whims of the team. As much as the game's about creating your team, SI appears just as keen to listen to what people want from the game.

So how's it looking now? Essentially you log in with an email address and password, select a squad from the pool of players in the 'game world', or simply auto-select and let the computer take care of it for you. As long as you don't go above the mandatory £100k wage ceiling, you can pick whoever you like, providing someone hasn't got there first. The first thing to note is that although the players themselves are from the real world of football, you have to create your own fictional team name (Pathetic Athletic), complete with nickname (The Tossers), stadium name, pitch length and width, as well as all your own personal details, photo, logo, favourite team, the area where you live and so on. That way, Sports Interactive reasons, you won't end up with dozens of people all playing as Manchester United to gain the advantage. In FML, it's all about your signings, playing the transfer market, keeping an eye on the contract situation and, of course, your tactical nous on match day.

Talking of transfers, SI is keen to push the auction-style system used in the game, with players able to bid up to a deadline in traditional style, or perhaps take the plunge and snag that tricky winger in an instant buy - and that applies to loans as well as full transfers, while other players (such as free transfers) can be bid on based on their daily salary. As you might expect, you have to watch out for gazumping - a factor that's sure to be a big issue in the fully fledged games when they get going in the beta test. But unlike FM, FML takes a more short-term approach to contracts, so you might end up only securing the services of a player on a four-week contract, for example.

Bottle pissers beware

In terms of ranking, it's not entirely clear exactly how it will work, but SI has stressed that it is experimenting with a proportionate system where casual players will be awarded more points for a win (and likewise lose more points for a defeat) than someone who plays multiple games a day. So, unlike other MMOs, the accessibility level should be extremely high, with the incentive to dip in and out just as strong as the "bottle-pissers" who want to live and breathe the game. That in itself makes FML about ten times more appealing than most MMOs for the average gamer.

All the little touches you're used to from FM appear in FML, from the font style and general look and feel of the front-end, to the drop-down menus and general intuitive ease of tabbed/drop-down menu navigation. For example, upon starting up the game you have the choice to go for single or multi-windowed view to allow all your background guff to still be easily accessible (while you 'work'...), while every part of every menu seems to hot-link to something else of interest. Having refined so much of the interface in FM, it's a breeze to just enter the game, arrange the squad, sort out general and advanced tactics, enter the chat room, find a player, set up a friendly challenge and play the match. Once a player has responded, the whole match scenario plays out almost exactly as it does in FM, so it's not a game that will take anyone long to get to grips with.

In-game, there are three different match speeds (which you have to agree to between you), and FML allows players to haggle over such details via the instant messenger system. Meanwhile spectators can actually join your game-in-progress to see how you're doing, as well as chime in with cheeky quips of their own. Perhaps the most crucial element of any online football management game is how stoppages are handled, such as enforced tactical changes brought about by injuries or sending-offs. In such situations, you're given a one minute 'Time-Out' to make any tweaks, which keeps the game fast and free-flowing.

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