Football Manager 2009

Football Manager 2009
(PC)

Football Manager 2009 can now be ordered from Amazon.co.uk at a price of £14.99 (the game has an RRP of £39.99). This price includes free Super Saver Delivery.

FIFA 09 (PS3)/(Xbox 360) is now available to buy and so too is Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 (PS3)/(Xbox 360).

If you like Football Manager, then you may also be interested in FIFA Manager 09.

On September 3rd 2009, an official Sports Interactive video revealed that a number of feature changes have now been made for inclusion with Football Manager 2009. The game was released on November 14th 2008 and the following are officially features that are now present with FM 2009:

- There will now be in-game Assistant Manager feedback providing information about player motivation, and general feedback about tactics; how your tactics are working, how they could be improved, and what you can do to exploit the tactics of the oppostion.

- An improved press element will now be present in the game.

- Transfer rumours will now be spread - some will be made up, others however will be entirely accurate.

- For the first time ever Press Conferences have been added to the game. Press Conferences will be held before and after matches, and also when you first become manager of a new club. Interview answers will need to be carefully considered as they may later come back to haunt you; journalists will remember what you say and potentially use your answers against you at a later date.

- You will be able to request that your players learn special moves. Sometimes it will work, others it will not. It's another excellent way of grooming new talent (and old talent alike) and readying players for fantastic first team action.

- When you begin the game you can play as a female manager. As there are a percentage of female gamers that play the game, this change has been implemented to allow you to choose your sex at the start of your career.

- The board confidence feature has been improved.

- There will be 350 000 players and staff included in the database.

- The user interface has been modified. Widescreen support has been added for the first time ever.

- The transfer system code has been completely rewritten, the shortlistings feature has been improved to be far more efficient and accurate.

- There will now be a 3D Match Engine for all those that wish to use it. The 2D engine will still be available to use if you'd prefer it/your computer is not strong enough to run the 3D engine; a 3D engine has been worked on for the past 3 years however and SI are now fully confident that this feature will be faultless.

- Whilst watching the game you'll be able to rewind the action to watch highlights whenever you want.

- There will now be a 'TV View' when playing matches so that the match action takes over the full screen and it's therefore easy to see what's going on on-field. You'll be able to use the old panel display if you'd prefer, or you can choose to use the TV View and choose exactly which information you wish to be displayed on screen (player ratings etc.).

The Official Football Manager 2009 Demo is available to download now from Steam.

This Demo is provided completely free of charge and in order to install and play the demo you will first need to download and install the Steam software onto your computer and register for a Steam account. Steam is a platform you may have utilised in the past if you've played such Half Life mods as Counter Strike and Day of Defeat. Steam is free to download and registering for an account with Steam is also completely free so downloading the Football Manager 2009 demo will cost you absolutely nothing.

A couple of changes have also been made for those wishing to play the PSP version of the game; Football Manager 2009 Handheld. For the first time ever there will be teams available to you from multiple leagues across the world. When playing the game you'll be able to add up to 3 top tier divisions on top of the one which you originally choose.

The game will also come complete with two skins; a light tone skin and dark tone skin. When creating the game two skins were made, and not knowing which to flow with it was decided that both would be available and the user would be able to choose which they personally preferred.

For the first time ever Football Manager Handheld will also come complete with a 2D match engine. This is something that PC/Mac users have been playing with for many a year now, it's new to the handheld world however and a fantastic new change to this great little handheld management sim. There will be two modes of 2D Match engine; full field mode, or zoomed in mode where the 2D match engine will purely be focused on the match action movement of the ball.

Before any information was officially released about Football Manager 2009; I wrote the following to highlight what I personally wanted to see from Football Manager 2009. I came up with six things I'd like to see from Football Manager 2009, and one of the features I listed as one that I'd like to see was that there would be a 3D Match Engine. I'm very pleased that there will be a 3d Match Engine, and a poll I ran showed that 60% of my readers also wanted to see this change made. Here are the six things I wanted to see with Football Manager 2009:

1. First things first here; I'm expecting Sports Interactive not to repeat the glitch that was present with the release of last years game Football Manager 2008 whereby near enough every other goal is ruled out as offside, when the only goals that do seem to count are those that actually are scored from offside positions; that was my pet peeve about Football Manager 2008. They did eventually solve this problem with a patch, in my opinion this glitch never should have existed in the first place however and I do not expect to see similar glitches of this sort with the release of FM2009.

2. Increased realism when it comes to high score lines. With the 2008 edition of the game you could be 4-0 up in the cup with only 5 minutes to go, and despite dominating the entire match the other team would then come out of nowhere and bring the game level/actually win a game that they'd been outplayed in for much of the match. It's not realistic, and unless you're Turkey in Euro 2008 then that many late goals are not to be expected.

3. Increased difficulty levels. Every year the game is made more realistic and it's therefore harder to work your way up the league system. No matter how difficult they make the game however; it's always relatively easy to take a team from the Blue Square Premier/North/South right up to the Premier League with relative ease. With 2008 I met my match in that I wasn't able to clinch the Premier League title with Oxford; I did however manage to win the League Cup, the FA Cup, the UEFA Cup, and the Community Shield also all by the year 2015. It's currently 2008 and Oxford United show no signs of leaving the Blue Square Premier; they've only won the League Cup once in their history (back in 1986 against QPR when it was called the Milk Cup), have never been in Europe, and never won the FA Cup either. The likelihood of Oxford United being able to actually achieve all of this by the year 2015 is incredibly unlikely; the likelihood of Oxford United winning any of these trophies by the year 2015 is ridiculous in fact. So yes; increased difficulty levels are a must for Football Manager 2009.

4. More options for team talks. For the last few seasons we've been able to talk to the players before the game and at half-time; to give them words of encouragement or to tell them that they're playing like pros and to keep up the good work...what I'd like to see now then is the ability to tell the players what to do in the middle of a game. Say you're losing 2-1 with 10 minutes to go; I want to be able to shout orders from the sideline as any self respecting real life manager truly would do. To tell the players to push on and that points can be gained in this game if the players set their minds to it and work hard to hit the ball up the field and bash it in the back of the net. Football Manager is ever improving and this would be a great next step in the evolution of the beautiful game.

5. For Football Manager not to become a joke and bring in elements such as ability to change ticket prices/shirt prices etc.; this is not the job of a football manager. I've played a lot of different football management sims in the past and the ones that have failed the most are those that attempt too much and try to bring in abilities such as choosing shirt colours, picking what you sell in the club shop, choosing what burgers are for sale at half-time etc.; it just doesn't work and a real football manager is not delegated with jobs such as these. So let's keep the managerial job as real as possible and not ruin it with minor details which detract away from the overall quality of the game.

6. A 3D match engine would be nice... I quite like the 2D engine, watching the round dots kick a smaller round dot around the field; a 3D match engine would be a nice touch however, and even if it was just 3D highlights that could be watched at the end of the game then this I feel would be a brilliant feature to see implemented within the game.

After spending two days at number two in its category, on the lenses third day in the overall Top 100; Football Manager 2009 hit number one for the Video Games topic here at Squidoo. I'm very proud of the lenses achievements and the lens hitting the number one spot for the first time has been my proudest Squidoo achievement thus far.

The lens finally hit the Video Games top spot on September 6th 2008.

On September 26th 2008 I was granted the great honour that is Lens of the Day here at Squidoo. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever truly believe that one of my lenses would ever get chosen to be Squidoo's Lens of the Day and I'm therefore incredibly proud that this lens was chosen and acclaimed with this great honour.

This lens was my first to reach the top 100, my first to hit the number one spot in its topic, and just to top it all off; it was also my first ever lens to be granted the great award that is Lens of the Day. I'm very proud of this achievement and am amazed, enthralled, and also incredibly delighted to have had one of my lenses chosen to become Squidoo's Lens of the Day.