Football Manager 2010‘s greatest achievement is it enables series veterans to easily manage the information overload typical of the series; its biggest flaw is it doesn’t do enough for the novice.

The manager is constantly overwhelmed with stats and options in this series. Selecting the first team and substitutes from a squad of 40-plus players for the first time is traditionally a time-consuming affair since picking the best player for a single position is a complicated task. There are 36 major player attributes to take into consideration, each with ratings between 1 and 20, and player roles may require at least competence in several interrelated attributes.

The new manager might be flummoxed gauging something as simple as a player’s speed. Where to start? There is the Pace attribute, of course. Ah, but it’s not that simple because the Acceleration stat must also be taken into account. Then there’s Stamina which will determine how he’ll last over the course of 90 minutes. Oh wait, there’s also Agility and Balance, and we can’t forget his Natural Fitness.

Let’s not even go into the fact there are hidden attributes that affect player behaviour and ability.
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Though I’m a massive Manchester United fan, I’ve never been particularly inclined to play them during a Championship Manager/Football Manager campaign. That would be like playing as Goliath (in full-faced armoured headgear) in battles mostly against hapless Davids. Victory will follow victory but it all feels hollow.

CM/FM is at its very best when it’s about the little guys. It’s about taking a team anchored at the bottom of the league with no pedigree and with players no one’s heard of, beating expectations and leading them to dizzying heights. It’s the allure of infinite possibility.

Years and years ago, I looked at the English league standings and discovered the bottom-most club in the lowest league (then Division 4) was a club known as Torquay United. I knew nothing about Torquay. I didn’t know where it was located, how big it was, how old it was, what its history was yet to my mind, this football club was the quintessential underdog, the no-hopers.

I chose that club when playing CM for the first time. This was the primitive CM2 96/97 edition, which included digitised commentary by Clive Tyldesley. There was no 3D graphics engine to display matches, not even a 2D match display. It was all text and Tyldesley. It didn’t take me long to tire of the digitised commentary but I had it on long enough to learn Torquay wasn’t actually pronounced “Toh-kweh.”

This would be the ultimate challenge, I thought, a true test of managerial skill. Let’s see how far I can take this “Toh-kee,” this little club I knew nothing about, the one with the odds stacked against them. What a campaign it turned out to be, one of my all-time favourites, right up there with Panzer General, Steel Panthers and UFO: Enemy Unknown. It took me five seasons to lead this unfashionable club from Division Three to the Premier League after which the Gulls dominated the upper echelons for seasons to come. This was fantasy football at its most fantastical, of course, but it was so exhilarating an experience I didn’t care one whit about the sheer absurdity of it all.
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Football Manager 2010 is the latest in Sport Interactive‘s long line of football management games. Other historied franchises fall and fade away but this one only improves with age. The series began as Championship Manager in the Nineties before a change of publishers saw the developer lose the rights to the title. It is perhaps a change for the better. You can have a grand time with this game without ever getting close to winning a championship.

The game can be drily described as a football management sim but that would be akin to describing football as a game of 22 adults  in shorts chasing an inflated bladder of air. Long-time fans appreciate Football Manager best as a role-playing game.

No other game gets to the heart of a football campaign like this series, no other game gets you in the mindset of a football manager as well as this one does. This is the game to get if you really want to know what could possibly turn a celebrated 68-year-old knight of the realm into a red-faced screaming lunatic, why a professorial Frenchman might want to kick a defenceless bottle of water with venom.

Role-playing games are fundamentally about stories and Football Manager has them in spades. There are the shared talking points — mention Ibrahima Bakayoko and you’ll get a chuckle out of series veterans — but each Football Manager campaign is a unique story with its own epic highs and crushing lows. There will be the thrilling come-from-behind victories, the devastating defeats, the bargain signings, the betrayal of star players, the drama of the final day of the league.

As a sterile sports simulation, Football Manager does reasonably well since the results are more or less what you might expect. You can merely shrug when FM2010’s number-crunching predicts Brazil will win the World Cup this year because you could certainly see it happening.

(Just as in real life, amusing Bizarro-land outcomes will occur, however. FM2010 seems convinced the 2009/2010 season will end with Liverpool winning the Champions League and Mark Hughes leading Manchester City to the league title.)

The delight comes not from discovering how accurately the game simulates the 2009/2010 season; it is exploring the what-ifs and could-bes in years to come. Winning the Premier League in 2009/2010 as Manchester United will be satisfying; winning the Premier League in 2016/2017 as Torquay United will be something to shout about.

The latest game in the series has been widely described as the finest yet and having spent almost 23 hours completing my first season, I can only agree. Sports Interactive has taken all the awkward and unwieldy aspects of the game, shuffled things around and made everything coherent and presentable. Though neophytes will still likely find it inscrutable, FM2010 has enough to make the jaded fan fall in love with the series all over again.

The most impressive thing about Torchlight is how well it scales. On a technological level, it can be configured to be playable on netbooks and its colourful cartoony graphics will look charming enough on a souped-up desktop. The game is not without its technical issues — everything seems to freeze momentarily whenever a new monster is summoned, for instance — but it’s a rare 2009 PC game that will run on almost all but the most ancient of machines.

It is in gameplay, though, that Torchlight’s scalability is at its most impressive. This is a game that caters to all skill levels. Played at the lowest level of difficulty, Torchlight is almost a laidback experience. It’s certainly a simple game. You needn’t spend years training in a Chinese monastery to be able to point and left-click. At the highest level of difficulty, however, Torchlight plays almost like a frenetic arcade game, a throwback to a bygone time when you’d pay to be challenged. The action is intense and satisfying, and the threat of permadeath will lead to the development of more sophisticated tactics to keep characters alive. Player will learn to use allies as diversions, exploit defensive skills, pull foes out of large mobs and use snaring to buy breathing room.
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There are generally two schools of thought when it comes to your classic tabletop RPGs. There is the more serious RPGer who demands every pizza and Coke-fueled session be a production worthy of the Royal Shakespeare Company, full of emotional handwringing by characters with phonebook-length histories in a game world fully fleshed out by a frustrated novelist of a GM. When it came time to translate this experience to the PC, this became the Ultimas, the Baldur’s Gates.

The other type of RPGer just wants to kill anything that moves and be rewarded with totally sweet gear. On the PC, this would be represented by your Might and Magics and, in more streamlined form, your Diablos. Here the emphasis is less on “who” or “why” and more on the “what” as in “what do I get for slaughtering indigenous life forms having the temerity to appear in my general vicinity?”

Loot is a major part of the appeal of action RPGs like Torchlight (a slick refinement of the Diablo formula), but those who play the game in VHHC mode will have ambivalent feelings about items.

Thunder Dragonne, Tesla’s Rail Cannon, Double Damage Axe!, Wonder’s Singing Brush, Sword of Adam (the most eccentric blade since Baldur’s Gate II’s Lilarcor) … golden-hued weapons like these are undeniably useful while dungeon-crawling since the bonuses they confer can often mean the difference between living another hour or creating another VHHC character.

On the other hand, equipped items are irretrievably lost upon death (which is, of course, permanent). As VHHC characters lead very short lives, the player quickly learns to never grow too attached to an item. That gem-encrusted rifle glimmering with cunning enchantments may indeed be worthy of a Trill-Bot 4000 opus but it will never be seen again when its wielder dies.

Use it or lose it is the order of the day.
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