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Football Manager 2018

 
I played Football Manager 2012 for 37 seasons. How am I supposed to move on now?Nov 15, 2019 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunThe year is 2049. My avatar, managing Tottenham Hotspur, is 67. Harry Redknapp is long dead. Chris Smalling is my assistant manager. Now, as I finally wind down my Football Manager 2012 playthrough through an unholy combination of bugs and, well, having won everything, the future beckons. I m having an existential crisis and the line between real and fictional is melting. But let s start at the beginning. (more…) Football Manager 2019 preview: a meaningful step forward for the seriesOct 9, 2018 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun When you re working on annual iterative titles, it is difficult, says Miles Jacobson, Studio Director at Sports Interactive. You re always going to get people turning around saying you haven t added anything. And no matter how much you add, you re still going to get people saying that. That s the challenge that the Football Manager series faces every year. It remains, as it always will be, a game about being a football manager. It will always be about selecting a team to manage, creating tactical systems, crafting squads of players and sending them out onto virtual pitches in the pursuit of glory. And it will always, to quote SI s Director of Development Marc Duffy, aim to achieve suspension of disbelief in the player s mind. The question then, as with all annual series, is the extent to which the game advances on its predecessors. In the case of Football Manager 2019, the studio is bullish about their ambitions for this year s release. (more…) New Features Revealed - Football Manager 2019Sep 27, 2018 - Community Announcementshttps://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/30346435/726855c2b1572a25eb00302c2042ca380d56c3e6.gif Football Manager 2019 brings you closer the heart of the beautiful game than ever before. New features and enhanced game mechanics enable you to control your team in fresh and authentic ways, creating an ever more emergent way of storytelling. Two core areas of the game, training and tactics, has received significant attention this season with the training module completely overhauled and the tactics creator upgraded to reflect innovations in the modern game. Training Overhaul Precisely modelled and verified on the professional game, new and bespoke sessions and schedules give you more control when preparing for your next fixture and developing your squad on the training pitch. Tactical Innovation Push the boundaries and create your own footballing philosophy with new styles that reflect the most popular tactical innovations in modern football, as well as an array of new team instruction options. New Manager Induction New to Football Manager? Get to know the game with an interactive tutorial that will introduce you to the fundamentals of football management and maps your route to the very top of the game. Official Bundesliga License All 36 teams from the Bundesliga and 2.Bundesliga are fully licensed with official logos, kits and player faces as well as trophies for the respective leagues. Fresh Look A restyled contemporary skin incorporates the Football Manager brand colours and gives FM19 a fresh, re-energised look. Further additions include match improvements including VAR & goal-line technology, agent feedback during transfer negotiations, manager environments, enhanced pre-match briefings, UI improvements, new Steam achievements and much more. Over the coming weeks as we build towards the pre-release Beta, more features will drop on our social channels – so get following if you don’t already. Football Manager Twitter Football Manager Facebook Football Manager Instagram Football Manager Youtube List of all Features Announced so far Playing Football Manager doesn't make you a football managerSep 27, 2018 - EurogamerThere's something about Football Manager that makes it feel more than the sum of its parts. At its core it's just a database, a list of names that are assigned numbers which are then dragged and dropped into certain areas of a pitch by those who play it. Yet there's a reason players will don a real suit in preparation for playing in a virtual cup final, scout real-life footballers for a potential in-game transfer and why Sky Sports utilise the game's stats in its Premier League coverage Premier League. For many players, these numbers and names culminate in giving them a sense of unmatched gratification. A large part of Football Manager's appeal is in how it takes you that little bit closer to the environments of masterminds like Pep Guardiola and Jose Mourinho. The truth, though, is that despite its ability to be used as an all-encompassing football database with an unimaginable depth of information, it's not a true reflection on what it takes to be an actual coach. Most real coaches spend their Saturday afternoons standing on the sidelines in the pouring rain taking abuse from Dave the double glazier. Football Manager can't hope of coming close to the real thing, in more ways than one. Read more… The PC Gamer Top 100Aug 31, 2018 - PC GamerFor a constantly updated list of our favorite games on PC, check out our list of the best PC games right now.  Every year, the PC Gamer team embarks on an epic quest to choose the top 100 PC games. Where previously we voted for our favourite games, this year we talked: discussing each of our nominations and deciding which games should make the list. The result is a more honest, considered reflection of our conflicting tastes and opinions as PC gamers. This list represents what we think are the greatest PC games you can play today. We wanted to celebrate the breadth and variety of PC gaming, and so, for the most part, have restricted ourselves to one game per series. You'll also find a selection of personal picks: games we individually love that didn't quite make the cut. Enjoy! If you're looking for a list of the games that helped shape PC gaming as we know it, try the 50 most important PC games of all time. 100. Path of Exile RELEASED 2013 | LAST POSITION New entry Steven Messner: Path of Exile has quietly become one of the best action RPGs around thanks to its almost incomprehensible depth and wildly different seasonal leagues, where whole new systems are introduced. But the best part is its character customisation and spell crafting system. Path of Exile encourages players to make marauders who let spell totems do all the killing for them, witches who melt hordes with a fiery beam, or duelists that cover every inch of the map in a deadly rain of arrows. 99. Twisted Insurrection RELEASED 2010 | LAST POSITION New entry John Strike: Tiberian Sun's best mod brazenly shames the original Firestorm expansion in almost every way. It’s bigger and bolder, offering new buildings, a whole fleet of new units and even a new faction. There’s a completely new musical score and dozens of single player missions, some of which are based on the original Command & Conquer. Not only are new missions and units still being added, but, as a standalone free download, it's the most accessible way to play one of C&C's greats. 98. Killing Floor 2 RELEASED 2016 | LAST POSITION 81 Evan Lahti: There are disturbingly few places in video games where I can cut an evil clown in half with a quad-barrelled shotgun. Killing Floor 2 is the world’s greatest gore effects system laid atop an enjoyable skeleton. Hordes of monsters trickle into the map, magnetized to your position, and you mulch them with buzzsaw-spitters, incendiary shotguns, rocket launchers, or a microwave cannon that heats enemies from the inside until they burst. The dynamic slow-mo system adds so much, dampening the chaos just enough—granting extra moments to take aim or take in the sight of an intestine flying across the screen. Tripwire is a skilled digital gunsmith, and the detail lent to particle effects and reload animations holds up wonderfully even under the scrutiny of these plentiful, slowed-down sequences. I also love that KF2 doesn&#x...We remember Manager Man, the mascot of Football ManagerAug 7, 2018 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun After over a decade of leading Football Manager, watching from the sideline and becoming increasingly animated on the box art, series mascot Manager Man has been fired. Just as his dramatic poses (from the nostrils down) seemed to confirm his leadership was finally steering the series right, becoming cheers and fist-pumps over the past few years, he’s out the door. It’s scandalous. Publishers Sega have given Manager Man the boot and gone for a first-person perspective they call “a manager’s eye view of the pitch” with Football Manager 2019. It’s bang out of order. Let’s at least give Manager Man a good send-off with a look back at his many faces, moods, and hot racing vehicles. (more…) Football Manager 2019 firing Manager Man in NovemberAug 7, 2018 - Rock, Paper, Shotgun Another year in the Football Manager series means another set of tweaks and revisions to the well-established formula, as we’ll see in the newly-announced launch of Football Manager 2019 (and its streamlined sibling Football Manager Touch 2019) on November 2nd. Expect the addition of Germany’s DFL Bundesliga and the shock firing of the series mascot, Manager Man. This mysterious sportsdad, also known as Ian Football (lore deep cut: he’s canonically the son of Manfred Mann but wanted to make his own name off his own work), has graced the box art of every game since FM2005 but now… he’s fired. It’s a scandal. (more…) Football Manager 2018 Steam stats soar in wake of World CupJul 30, 2018 - PC GamerAnnounced via Twitter, FM head honcho Miles Jacobson says Football Manager 2018 averages 500,000 hours per day on Steam, with 553,806 hours clocked yesterday alone. Jacobson says over 270 million hours have also been recorded since launch on Steam last year, and that its peak concurrent players yesterday was 67,524.  Steam Charts identifies the same—and suggests peak concurrent numbers have jumped following this summer's World Cup. With its expanded Medical Centre, overhauled graphics engine and story-generating Dynamics System, I thoroughly enjoyed Football Manager 2018 at launch. So much so, that I'm still playing the same save—as are a number of other virtual coaches, it seems.   With the long game in mind, keeping things fresh in FM is crucial. To this end, here are the 50 best Football Manager 2018 wonderkids to replace tired legs years into the future.  What does no one seem to understand about a game you love?Jul 11, 2018 - PC GamerToday's question is inspired by some of the social media conversations doing the rounds lately about professions, which started with this tweet. We thought we'd change the subject to gaming. No matter what games you love, you'll always read or hear opinions on them that you disagree with. Maybe it feels like people aren't getting the thing that's good about the game in question, or perhaps they don't see why something is important to PC gaming when you do.  Well, let's complain about those people. Today's PCG Q&A: What does no one seem to understand about a game you love? Leave your answers in the comments. James Davenport: The intricacies of Dark Souls' lore don't matter Just let that imagery wash over you. Read item descriptions, sure, but to play Dark Souls—any of them—you don't need to know a goddamn thing about the story. There's a history there if you want to dig deep, but I play games like I read books the first time through: I just go. Getting hung up on every paragraph in a Pynchon novel (I'm that guy, sorry) means you'll never finish the thing. Same goes for Dark Souls. You'll start to notice patterns and catch onto its bleak themes naturally. Too often I hear about people turned off not just by the difficulty of Dark Souls, but by the fantasy setting—decrypting obtuse histories with long-winded family trees ain't easy either—and how little it outright tells you about anything.  At risk of sounding like an English major (I'm an English major), Dark Souls is a poem. It doesn't need to be understood. It needs to be felt. And it feels metal as hell. So bleak. Here's my take: humans are the worst. We're always hungry, easily bored, envious, anxious, destructive beings. Committing every scrap of Dark Souls lore to memory will tell you the same thing over and over with different players, and that's the point. So, memorize those names if you want to, or just take a nice, depressing, self-critical bath in Dark Souls assurance that we're screwed and it's our fault. Evan Lahti: Team Fortress 2 is the most influential PC game of the past decade Many of the most significant trends in PC gaming were guinea pigged and test tubed in Team Fortress 2. The modern, living multiplayer games began with the "Sniper vs. Spy" update in May 2009. TF2 can be credited for the style of multiplayer storytelling seen in games like Overwatch—the way characters chatter with each other dynamically mid-match, and the way games' stories are told outside them, bleeding into marketing, teasers, comics, and other media in a way that we almost expect at this stage. Stuff we take for granted like characters being reinvented for the benefit of shaking up the meta—the way we react to a shotgun rebalance or guided rocket in Fortnite—started in TF2. The ubiquity of loot boxes and ...What happened when we ran England Croatia through Football Manager 2018 ten timesJul 10, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunTomorrow heralds the most heart-stopping moment in English national football since John Barnes bravely claimed to know how to rap. England face Croatia in the World Cup semi-final; if they win, they make the finals. If they lose, nobody sings that Lightning Seeds song for at least another two years. It’s win-win! But which will it be? The answer lies in science. Or the closest approximation thereof, which is simulating the match in Football Manager 2018 ten times and seeing what the most common outcome is. Computer, come home. (more…) I was in Football Manager and I don't know how to feel about itJul 10, 2018 - EurogamerIn 2008, aged 16, I signed for Lewes FC. The club was in ascendancy: newly promoted to the Conference, we had a new stand at the stadium (later paid for by selling our best players, but that's another story), a new Under 18s coach, brought in from the Brighton and Hove Albion academy just down the road, and a new intake of what was, genuinely, the best squad of non-academy players in the south of England. Most of them came from professional academies like Brighton, Bournemouth and Southampton, some released at the big jump from Under 16s to Under 18s, others who had the chance to carry on but turned it down (and if you're wondering why they might reject something as fabled as an U18's contract - known as a "scholarship" - at a top club by the way, it's probably because that contract entitles you to the sum total of about 60 a week, mandatory residence in "digs" and a BTEC in Sports Bullshit that you have to take instead of college). Some, like yours truly, came from non-league clubs, having never quite edged their way in on the ground floor. For four years I road-tripped around half the professional academies in the bottom-right corner of the country; three days a week my poor mum picking me up from school and, instead of heading home, handing me a sandwich, a protein bar and a sports drink and driving me two hours down the coast, or up to London, or sometimes just down the road. For those fours years I'd been consistently rejected. From Portsmouth, for a chap they flew in from Argentina, from Charlton Athletic for a lad from the USA, Fulham for the England U16s goalkeeper and from Brighton - twice - for a boy who, to be fair to him, was about twice my height and really very good. But I got into Lewes. Read more… Has a game ever felt like it's become your job?Jul 7, 2018 - PC GamerWhen you're doing your millionth daily quest, grinding for a particular item or just playing on autopilot, a game can suddenly go from being enjoyable to a weird obligation. It can feel a little bit like having a job, even when it's a game you otherwise love playing. Here, we share our experiences of that. Has a game ever felt like it's become a job to you? Let us know your answers in the comments.  Joe Donnelly: every instalment of Football Manager Me, every October: "I'm going to give Football Manager a miss this year. It takes up too much of my time." Me, every November: "THAT WAS NEVER A PENALTY REF, YOU @#!$" I've been playing Football Manager since its mid-'90s Championship Manager days. I play it all year round, but I'm most invested at launch—which is when it takes over my life. I rarely stray from my beloved Celtic, and I cannot stand to see them lose. I sing You'll Never Walk Alone with my scarf raised above my head before important matches, and scream bloody murder when the referee invariably gets every fucking decision wrong in games against city rivals Rangers. I dream about winning the treble. I talk tactics at the dinner table. My girlfriend hates me for several weeks. I can hardly blame her. I am this man .  Andy Kelly: The Old Republic I was deep into Star Wars: The Old Republic for a few months, until I decided that I was going to get into crafting. This is something I always avoid in MMOs because, without exception, it's a deeply tedious pursuit. But for some reason I felt like my Sith Inquisitor needed to take time out from battling Jedi to get into synthweaving. And, unsurprisingly, crafting in The Old Republic is tedious too, despite the gimmick that you send your companion to do it, because you still have to tell them what to go craft—and the process is achingly slow. So, after catching myself spending a whole evening crafting low-level items to get my synthweaving skill up, I realised I was basically doing a job. In space. So I packed the whole game in and never returned out of respect for my free time. Samuel Roberts: GTA Online I've had some extremely good times playing GTA Online—particularly the heists, and any time I let the PC Gamer team share my Vigilante. But because most activities in the game are driven by moneymaking, rather that just doing a mission because it's fun or gives you a bit of story like in GTA 5 proper, it means you can find yourself in a bit of a grind trying to get a car you like. I've definitely been in that position a few times, where a double XP weekend has me working far too hard to add some new vehicles to my garage. I can think of two times where I took a break from the game because I realised I was doing this, and decided to be a bit more sensible about my time in Los Santos.  Jarred Walton: All games do when you're benchmarking (and Fallout Shelter) Not to be too c...The 100 best-selling games on Steam in 2018 so farJul 6, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunWe’ve just passed the half-way point of 2018, so Ian Gatekeeper and all his fabulously wealthy chums over at Valve have revealed which hundred games have sold best on Steam over the past six months. It’s a list dominated by pre-2018 names, to be frank, a great many of which you’ll be expected, but there are a few surprises in there. 2018 releases Jurassic World Evolution, Far Cry 5 Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Warhammer: Vermintide II are wearing some spectacular money-hats, for example, while the relatively lesser-known likes of Raft, Eco and Deep Rock Galactic have made themselves heard above the din of triple-A marketing budgets. (more…) The nightmare visions of recreating England coach Gareth Southgate in Football Manager 18Jul 4, 2018 - Rock, Paper, ShotgunFoot-to-ball is returning to its origin! A trio of lethal predators on a jersey!   I T ’ S C O M I N G H O M E   And what better way to celebrate England’s passage into the World Cup quarter-finals than recreating soon-to-be knight of the realm Gareth Southgate within Foot-to-ball Manager 2018? Something… something is very wrong. (more…) PUBG, Dying Light, Battletech going cheap in Fanatical's Red Hot SaleJun 28, 2018 - PC GamerFeeling spoiled by the summer sun and summer sales? Fanatical has more beautiful bargains in this season of excess. Live now through July 1, the digital storefront's Red Hot Sale discounts everything from PUBG to Conan Exiles, Dying Light and Football Manager 2018. As always, I've lead with my top picks. Let's take a closer look. With 40 percent off, PUBG comes in at £17.99/your regional equivalent. With 46 percent off, Conan Exiles comes in at £20.39. With 70 percent off, Dying Light The Following—Enhanced Edition comes in at £13.19. And also with 70 percent off, Football Manager 2018 comes in at £11.39. The World Cup 2018 has turned over a few shocks already. Hone your skills in the latter and show 'em how it's done.  Elsewhere, Fanatical offers nine game bundles that cost just $1 each, as part of its Dollar Bundle Madness offer. My favourite is the DOS-driven Dollar Classics Bundle, but you can check out all nine this-a-way. Here are the top sellers: * ; Dollar Forever Bundle —27 mixed games for $1. * ; Dollar Jumbo Bundle —25 puzzle and hidden object games for $1. * ; Dollar Viva Bundle —24 hidden object, adventure and puzzle games for $1. * ; Dollar Classics Bundle —21 retro games for $1. Check out Fanatical's Red Hot Sale in full this way, and be sure to add your RED10 discount voucher at the checkout for a further ten percent off most games.  Some online stores give us a small cut if you buy something through one of our links. Read our affiliate policy for more info. Football Manager 2018 marks England's first World Cup game with a 66% saleJun 18, 2018 - PC GamerThe FIFA World Cup 2018 kicked off last week, and, to mark England's first game against Tunisia this evening, Football Manager is on sale on Steam. From now through July 16, FM 2018 costs 66 percent less its normal price—a number presumably inspired by the England international team's greatest achievement .  Seriously lads, let it go (says the Scotsman whose international team hasn't even qualified for a tournament since France '98).  With that discount, Football Manager 18 costs just £12.92/$17, which is a great price for a game brimming with stats, figures, players and, for the first time this year, dynamic personal relationships. As pulled from our 89-scored review, here's more on that last part:    Off the pitch is where the Dynamics system shines. In FM 2018 success in the dressing room affects success on the pitch. A fractured team is less likely to gel on match day, and, via its own dedicated sidebar tab and corresponding window, you’re now forced to balance ‘Match Cohesion’, ‘Dressing Room Atmosphere’, and ‘Managerial Support’. Each criterion is interlinked: winning games boosts Match Cohesion, which boosts Dressing Room Atmosphere, which boosts your team’s Managerial Support, which makes players try harder to win games, and so on.  A ‘Hierarchy’ screen ranks players by influence in the dressing room, wherein social groupings are determined by a number of variables—be that nationality, time spent at the club, and/or age, among a number of other factors. Upset a team leader or highly influential player and be prepared to pay the price.  FM 2018's dynamic system is ripe for story generation—which has always been my favourite thing about the series.  Speaking of stories, this tale about a Championship Manager player who travelled from China to England to meet his team is fascinating. But not nearly as fascinating as why and/or how anyone in the history of football and music thought this was a good idea: Visit Football Manager 2018 on Steam this wayFMdB mobile app brings Football Manager's database to your pocketJun 12, 2018 - PC GamerSports Interactive and Sega have launched FMdB Football Scout, a mobile app that brings Football Manager's exhaustive database to phones and tablets.  Billed as the "definitive football companion app", FMdB lets you browse the footie management sim's 500,000+ player database, and lets you examine stats such as age, position, preferred foot and players' strongest roles within their team.  The app also identifies each player's current out-of-100 rating, and their potential ability down the line. Likewise, contract details showcase estimated wages, and when said player signed and might leave their respective club. Here's how Celtic's ever-improving 21-year-old left back Kieran Tierney shapes up: All of this is free, but an in-app subscription service—£0.99 per month, £1.99 per three months, and £4.99 per 12 months all follow a seven-day free trial—offers extra information on player attributes and history minus ads. "Discover the next wonderkid before he's a household name and scout the players that your team should be signing," reads FMdB's App Store blurb—which is something we may keep in mind when next updating our list of the 50 best Football Manager 2018 wonderkids. I reckon I'll use the app during the World Cup, with the hope of snagging a few incoming stars in-game thereafter.   The FMdB Football Scout app is available for iOS devices, and will feature on Android soon. The history of Championship Manager and Football ManagerMay 26, 2018 - PC GamerEvery couple of weeks we feature a new guest article from our friends at Retro Gamer magazine, with their permission. This week, it's the history of Championship Manager and Football Manager, originally published in issue 178 in February 2018.  The series once known as Championship Manager, now Football Manager, turned 25 years old in 2017—but its story begins further back than that, in 1985. Two brothers, Paul and Oliver ‘Ov’ Collyer, decided to try and make their own game of soccer management from their Shropshire home. “We were playing the other games—League Division One, Mexico ‘86, the sort of international version of it, and Football Manager,” Ov explains. “ checking out all the other games of the time, and deciding we didn’t like them very much so, in our arrogance, deciding that we might be able to do it better.” This ambition took time to bloom, however, with the original Championship Manager being worked on here and there for six years before it was finished in 1991, and released in 1992 for Amiga, Atari ST and, shortly afterwards, PC. A big reason why it took so long was that… well, Paul and Ov were in school and college, literally bedroom-coding the game. “There were times when maybe six months would go by when we didn’t do anything on it,” Ov explains. “The other side of it was when we’d spend our holidays locked in the attic just trying to make it better.” And better things got—as the project took shape, the brothers starting hawking their wares to publishers around Britain, trying to get their new take on an established genre noticed. There were knockbacks, of course, with Electronic Arts turning Championship Manager down for not featuring enough ‘live action’. “The ‘no graphics’ thing was a big thing,” Ov says of another publisher’s feedback. “I remember ‘bolt some graphics on there’ was the exact phrase used.” But one company expressed an interest, and Paul and Ov put their game in front of publishing house Domark. The rest, as they say, is a funny old game—and a slow, drawn out slide into professionalism. The original Championship Manager might have been the beginning of a series with seemingly eternal appeal, but as a game it’s all but forgotten—immediately trumped by CM ’93 bringing with it real player names, and that’s where the hardcore football fans started to take notice. While, at the same time, critics started to miss the point. “The good reviews made us happy—the shit reviews made us miserable,” Ov laughs. “It was kind of depressing to read something really bad—you’d feel angry because we knew people were enjoying the game. But I guess we did have some really good supporters in the computer press. PC Zone got on board with it, I rememb...Football Manager 2018 partners with the NHS to promote mental health awarenessApr 20, 2018 - PC GamerFootball Manager 2018 will host an in-game mental health awareness campaign in partnership with the UK's National Health Service.  Designed to target "hard to reach" young men, digital pitch-side advertising boards promoting NHS Leeds Clinical Commissioning Group's MindMate website will be added to the game's 3D match engine.  As reported by the BBC (via PC Games Insider), clicking through the ads takes players to the Mindmate homepage—which features mental health advice, resources, a games suite, and stories from young people. The adverts are geo-targeted to the Leeds area and will run till mid-May, says the BBC.   "Mental health and wellbeing is an important subject for children and young people," the CCG's Dr Jane Mischenko tells the BBC, "so our aim is to signpost MindMate as a resource that they can turn to for support and advice when the time suits them." Bidstack's Simon Mitchell developed the adverts. He adds: "Males in particular are hard to reach and engage, and the gaming environment in Football Manager is a great way to connect with them." Football Manager 2018's in-game sponsors cover a wide range of retail and technology outlets, but also include the likes of videogames charity Special Effect and Prostate Cancer UKIf you struggle with mental health, here are some useful contacts:  UK Samaritans: 116 123 (free to call from landlines and mobile) US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-8255 International Suicide Prevention Directory NHS places mental health adverts in Football Manager 2018Apr 19, 2018 - EurogamerWhen we think of in-game advertising, the first thing that springs to mind is seeing logos for big brands in video games. Adverts for the likes of Coca-Cola, Nike and McDonalds. What most don't expect to see in their video game is an advert for the NHS. But that's exactly what Football Manager 2018 players - in Leeds, specifically - are currently seeing after the NHS placed in-game pitch-side hoardings promoting mental health. Read more…