Football Manager 2006 - Console First Look Preview

Wives, girlfriends and partners of football loving fanatics up and down the country had better soon prepare for the solitary treatment, as Sports Interactive's "divorce-inducing" Football Manager franchise makes the cross-over to the consoles in the shape of Football Manager 2006 for the PSP and Xbox 360. Despite a previous foray into the world of consoles with the 2002 release of Championship Manager 02/03 on the Xbox, Sports Interactive attributed the two formats as finally providing the platform to bring the experience over, and from what we can gather there's far more then a PC conversion in store.

Football Manager On The Move

TVG FM fanatic was recently privy to a demonstration of both versions and from what we can see life is never going to be the same again. With the ambition to create the "perfect game to play whilst having a crap", Football Manager Handheld isn't, as some thought a perfect conversion of its PC cousin, but instead a title that maintains the same experience but designed specifically around the handheld format. The result is shaping up to be a game that can be enjoyed in small fixes or for hours on end, benefiting from significantly reduced loading times/UMD access and weighing in with a mightily impressive six and a half hours of battery life from the PSP.

Players can select clubs from seven different countries (England, France, Holland, Italy, Germany and Spain) within the PSP version, which has increased from the previously confirmed six. Initialisation of the game is the longest wait throughout the entire game and takes approximately 3-4 minutes to set-up the various leagues and data that's needed. From there on in, Football Manager on the PSP is as streamlined as you could hope for, both in terms of the game's interface and overall experience. Making heavy use of hyperlinks and navigation mapped to the face buttons along with the shoulder buttons to skip forwards and backwards, SI have managed to work wonders with their first attempt at a PSP title, increasing squad sizes to 36 from the originally planned 30 and making sure everything we come to expect from Football Manager is in there. Team data we're reliably informed is accurate up to the January transfer window, with the exception of loans under certain circumstances.

There has been some controversy in recent Football Manager titles that the overall experience is beginning to get a little too complicated for its own good, so the purists will know doubt be happy to see Football Manager returning to its old-school textual match engine and training system on the PSP.

The game looks fantastic on the PSP screen and there's little surprise in the claim that SI are using every single byte offered by the PSP, largely because of just how much they've managed to squeeze onto the handheld; tactics, transfers, training, player histories, backroom staff feedback, media, the board and agents - what more could you want whilst on the move?

Next-Gen FM2006

Originally conceived as an Xbox 360 launch title and being based around a hybrid of ideas between FM2005 and 2006, SI along with SEGA made the decision to delay the Xbox 360 version after a similar delay was announced for the PSP. The move has been well worth it however, as not only have SI been able to squeeze in everything from FM2006 (and a little bit more) but also been able to add full Xbox Live support, heralding the potential future of multiplayer for the series. Extra time has also granted the team of researchers, who meticulously study players from every continent, the chance to increase the number of players included to 275,000, from the hundreds of divisions across 51 different countries that are featured within the game.

Much like the PSP version, the Xbox 360 version utilises an abundance of hotlinks and mapped buttons to ensure a console friendly interface; in fact the 360 undergoes even more dramatic changes, removing any resemblance of a side bar and utilising a nifty mechanism that makes use of the shoulder triggers/buttons, a quick access menu and clicking the right thumbstick to advance the game.

Unlike many developers, SI has embraced the Xbox 360 without its HD bells and whistles attached. As such the text-heavy screens are perfectly visible and clear on a standard definition TV, testified by testers huddled around the crummiest 14" TV possible in SI's Islington office. Despite their valiant attempts and the search for the perfect font, a few features were impossible to cram down onto a standard-definition TV as the resolution simply isn't high enough, such as displaying Split-Screen and Quick Tactics during the match; however the rest of the experience looks to be entirely playable even though it lacks the sharp clarity of a HD display.

Despite the appeal of Football Manager specifically designed for the Xbox 360, a lot of the interest stems from the multiplayer mode, which SI were keen to label as the future of the series. Initially Xbox Live within FM2006 provides support for up to 16 players in a cup tournament or 8 players within a league, with games taking as and when players are ready and not the turn-based approach of the PC version. Perhaps the biggest claim is the hope to one day have PC and 360 owners playing together, a feature that's believed to be technically feasible via Windows Vista, but one that SI assures us is better left to Microsoft to answer. Players are given a lot of parameters to change when creating such competitions, restricting clubs of a certain standard, making it available to friends exclusively or exporting the team you've meticulously worked away on in the single-player mode.

It's apparent throughout the demonstration that SI have taken the console approach seriously, from the inclusion of footie questions to disguise the game's loading sequences to the team fully supporting the Xbox 360's finest feature to date - Xbox 360 Achievements. A wide range of awards are available throughout the game, ranging from the relatively easy "Win a Match" or "Buy a Player" to the 150-point scoring "Undefeated Season". In many ways FM2006 on the Xbox 360 hints towards possible developments for the PC version, introducing such elements as a radar chart to provide a graphical representation of a player's skills ala Pro Evolution Soccer.

There has been some criticism, largely stemming from sources not particularly au-fait with the series, regarding the game's requisite of the hard-disc drive. Some have been particularly stinging when it comes to such a decision, however obviously have no knowledge of just how much data a game like FM2006 throws around; as Miles Jacobson MD Sports Interactive points out, they're the only ones who suffer at the end. Comparing the Xbox 360 to the PC, SI pointed out that the game takes advantage of the multi-core processor architecture, enabling match processing to be speeded up, whilst certain areas are slightly slower then the PC, resulting in an overall experience that evens itself out to the equivalent of a 2.8Ghz PC.