Football Manager 2009

I've Been Playing Championship and now Foothall Manager my whole life (at least the teenage-to-adult part of it) and, like a lamb to the slaughter, I've been spending too many hours checking obscure statistics and performance tables to figure out why my Sporting Cristal side has been stuttering in front of goal once again. The Cerveceros (Brewers) are my home town club (home town being Lima, Peru) and, just like Steve Hill with Chester, my first game on any recent FM always involves attempting to take Nolberto Solano's old side to the top of the South American game. Not that I've ever succeeded, mind.

Recent FM games have really frustrated me, in a lot of ways. A lot of familiar niggles keep creeping back in -defending seems to be too random, corners too effective, the Al having the ability to score with far higher number of shots than yourself - and 1 keep yearning for the days when I was actually good at the game and understood how it worked.

With this most recent iteration, my frustrations are (at the moment) yet to be unleashed. It has been tough going, but I'm getting there. One thing I've found is that it is difficult to get your teams to score goals, yet, in contrast to last year's game, it's now easier to keep clean sheets. Nevertheless the match engine seems to be working in a more logical manner, and the 3D engine is still exciting enough to provide "ooh!" moments. Ask me again in six months and 1 might come back with a list of "this is wrong, this is terrible, why didn't they do this?" points, but today, I'm loving it all over again. Now excuse me, I've got to decide between Wesley Brasilia or Luis Alberto Bonnet as my target man.