FM 2006 - Season 2030/31

Another season finishes. Unfortunately, these are dark, dark days for Liverpool.

The Problem is identified
I actually knew that I was going to be in trouble as soon as the new season started.

From the very first game, my vaunted Liverpool side, with strikers valued at over GBP60million, had trouble scoring. For some unknown reason, and for the first time in decades, my strikers couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.

At first, it didn't prove too big a problem as despite my lack of goal scoring, my defence was doing a marvelous job. No matter what the opposition threw at us, my defence somehow always managed to prevent a goal. Fantastic one on one saves? Check. Last ditch tackle from a defender catching up from behind? Check. Last ditch foul on attacker by the last defender? Check as well, unfortunately - still, we stopped the opposition from scoring and would still manage to either hold on for a draw or a win despite being down to 10 men.

The Problem rears its ugly head
Unfortunately, my defence couldn't keep it up.

To be fair, I knew this would happen sooner or later anyway. In the past, both Van Dijk and Orlando have had patches of bad form during the season. I knew that sooner or later, one or both of them would start playing badly and my Liverpool team would start to leak goals. My only hope was that my strikers would recover their form in time to gloss over any loss in form of my defence.

And so this was the position as we entered late March 2031. Sure enough, my defence started to leak goals. Unfortunately, my strikers didn't up their game. And so for a period of around a month, my Liverpool side became punching bags for every Tom, Dick and Harry who wanted a piece of the "Champions". As they reeled drunkenly from match to match, I desperately tried different ways of motivating my team, all to no avail.

In the end, we got knocked out of both the FA Cup and the Champions League at the quarter final stage (the shame!!!). That's right, my streak of winning consecutive Champions League Cups has finally been broken.

Naturally, it was at this point, after it was too late, that they finally started to play like champions again.
>:(

The Premiership
Anyway, despite my poor showing in the Champions League, I managed to walk away with the Premiership largely thanks to the efforts of my defence. You can see the final league table here:

As you can see from the table, although I walked the Premiership, this was largely due to me not having any real competition. Bolton came second but they only managed to pick up 67 points which is pretty pathetic for second place. Also, no idea what happened to Aston Villa who only got 56 points this year.

As you can see, I only managed 89 goals this year which is pretty poor when you consider that I normally get over 100 (or come very close to getting 100). Just to give you an idea of how bad my strikers were doing initially, 29 of those goals came in the last nine games after I had been knocked out of Europe. Incidentally, I let in six goals over the same period.

This really gives you a measure of how well my defence had been playing. Over the first 29 games of the season, they only let in 10 goals which is a pretty incredible stat.

The Squad
As per usual, you can find the details of my squad below.




As you can see, Massimo Orlando has done a great job this year and really challenged Van Dijk for the GK position. In fact, by the end of the year, they were playing equal amounts of games as I rotated them equally. Van Dijk really didn't like being relegated to a squad player (he was previously a first team player) and grumbled about this which led me to try and offer him and some cash in exchange for Silva (my current Brazil GK who is also a world class shot stopper). Unfortunately, Silva wasn't available for sale. Anyway, Orlando's jump in value is a direct result of his impressive performances.

Fernandez picked up a pretty bad injury this year. This is why Stuart Baines got so much playing time. Baines really stepped up to the plate while Fernandez was injured. This wasn't that big a surprise though, as when he was a kid, he was rated as a hot prospect and he has always tended to play well in the past. Unfortunately, despite playing brilliantly most of the time, he tends to fold a little in the big matches. Incidentally, this is also why he has never been my first choice DC.

John Farrell and Andy Rogers is a funny case. You may recall that I initially signed Andy Rogers as a hot prospect and John Farrell as a forth string CM. Unfortunately, during the preseason, John Farrell picked up an injury which meant that Andy Rogers got a chance to play a lot earlier then I initially planned. Luckily for me, Rogers stepped into my team like a duck to water. In fact, he played so well that Farrell remained in the reserves even after he recovered from his injury. In fact, if it hadn't been for Marcio picking up an injury during the year (and hence not being available as I was getting knocked out of both the FA Cup and the Champions League), Farrell would have gotten a lot less playing time.

My patience with Danielle Galli has also run out. Galli is an annoying player in that he can play brilliantly at times. Unfortunately, most of the time, he is either average (rating of 7) or non-existent (rating of 6). Anyway, I've decided to cash in on his value and sell him while I can still get some good moolah for him.

The biggest disappointment this year has been Sanchez. Although he did manage to score 19 goals (can you believe NONE of my strikers got past the 20 goal mark?), this just isn't good enough considering that I pay him over GBP80,000 per week. Again, I have decided to try and sell him to cash in while he still has some value.

On the plus side, I'm very happy with Ross Mills. Although he only managed an average rating of 7.13, he did manage to score 18 goals. Pretty impressive considering he was only 19 years old by the end of the season.

I'm also very happy with the contribution from Ian Carter. He is 21 now and managed to get a few games during the year. He really impressed during these games (he managed an average rating of 7.47). Granted, a lot of the games he played in were against lesser opposition but considering how well he has done, I think its time to give him a bigger role in the team.


So that's the position with Liverpool as we wrap up season 2030/31. Its going to be a massive off season for us as I try to bring in some new players to galvanise the team and make sure I start winning the Champions League again.

Ghostbusters - Multiplayer impressions

Wow – things have been hectic lately at the weekends (what with training courses, Gerry’s swimming lessons etc) and updates to my gaming blog seems to have taken a bit of a hit as a result! To make up for it, here are my impressions of the multiplayer portion of Ghostbusters on a weekday (this way, it only looks like I skipped one post!!).

The multiplayer itself is generally comprised of you and up to three other ghostbusters bustin' ghosts within a relatively small environment. There are several different game types which you can play. Some of them will simply be your team trying to catch as many ghosts as possible within the timeframe. Others involve you trying to either destroy or protect artifacts from the ghosts. And with the success of Horde mode on Gears of War, its nice to see a survival mode here as well where your team tries to survive waves of ghosts coming after you.

One of the things that the developers did right was to make the multiplayer co-operative in nature as you are always fighting ghosts. The only competition comes in the form of you trying to get a higher score than your teammates. This game just wouldn't work in a deathmatch type scenario and thankfully, the developers realized this.

Anyway, you may recall that I really enjoyed the game when I recently gave my impressions on the singleplayer portion of the game. Unfortunately, my thoughts on the multiplayer are much less ambivalent. In fact, to be perfectly honest, I think the multiplayer portion of the game is pretty poor for several reasons.

Feel – One of the things which made the singleplayer game stand out was how well the developers managed to capture the feel of the original ghostbusters movies. A large part of this was the characterization of the various ghostbusters. As I said in my previous post, the characterization is spot on.

However, as you might expect, the multiplayer game doesn't have any of this. Its simply you and three other people running around in a room blasting ghosts. Why is this a problem? In itself, it isn't.

The problem for Ghostbusters is that other games have done multiplayer superbly well. Just as when I was playing Rainbow Six: Vegas multiplayer, a similar situation occurred and I started to wonder – why am I playing this? Although the multiplayer wasn't bad per se, it just wasn't anywhere as good as the multiplayer in other games. Just as with R6:V, the strengths of this game don't match up well to how the multiplayer is structured. As I said before, it's a real shame that Ghostbusters doesn't have a co-op campaign mode.

Lag – The other thing which really bugs me about this game is that it suffers badly from lag. To give you an example, when I first started playing, I was pretty much always in last position and only managed to come 3rd in very rare circumstances. To be perfectly honest, I didn't think much of this at first as I was still learning how the multiplayer game plays and most of the time, the lag isn't visually noticeable (most of the time). However, its noticeable often enough that I decided to setup matches and let people join me instead of me joining them.

I immediately started to come first in pretty much every match I played. I'm pretty honest about my capabilities as a gamer. After years of playing video games, I know I'm not bad at them. I also know that I'm nowhere near good enough to be able to consistently come first when playing ranked matches online unless I have a significant advantage.

Ghostbusters - Singleplayer impressions

Not long ago, I mentioned that I was really looking forward to the new Ghostbusters game. As you can probably guess from the title of this post, I now have the game and if you have been paying attention to my gamerscore, then you will know that I have completed the singleplayer campaign.

In other words, no better time than now to give my impressions of the singleplayer game!

Stuff I liked!
Fan service - This game is probably the ultimate in fan service and is what changes this from an okay action game into a fun experience for ghostbusters fans. The developers have done a fantastic job of capturing the spirit and essence of the movie. At every turn, you find subtle and not-so-subtle pointers to the original movies. The sound of the proton pack charging up, the reappearance of Stay Puft, the use of direct quotes as achievements - I could go on, but I would be here all day!

All of these touches help transport you back 25 years to when the movie was first released. All of the reviews seem to have picked up on this but it really does bear mentioning again - if you are a ghostbusters fan, you will enjoy this game.

Characters - Although linked to the fan service point above, this point is so cool that its worth repeating on its own. The original writers (Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis) were involved in the script and it shows as the characterisation of the ghostbusters is spot on. Venkman is still the smooth talking "game show host" that he is in the movies, Stantz is still spouting off technobabble with boyish eagerness, Spengler is still the verbose scientist and Zeddemore is still the straight talking ordinary Joe. Seeing these characters interact with each other the way that you would expect them to makes a huge difference.

Creepy - One of the things which the developers managed to do was make the game really creepy. There are quite a few areas where you are wandering around with your goggles equipped and your PKE meter out. Naturally, in this kind of situation, you can't fire your proton pack so you are on edge a little bit anyway. Throw in some dark corridors, creepy ghost noises, flying bookshelves and the steadily increasing beep-beep-beep of your PKE meter as you get closer to the ghost and you can easily understand why the game is scary. Naturally, I played in the dark with the lights off as well.

Bustin' ghosts - Some reviews actually dinged the game for the repetitive nature of capturing ghosts which is one of the areas where I disagree with reviewers. In my opinion, the game actually does a good job of mixing up the types of ghosts you face - some of them need to be captured while others need to be obliterated (I believe neutronised is the technical term). In fact, according to the end of game stats, there are actually more ghosts that need to be obliterated than there are ghosts that need to be captured although this number will be skewed slightly by the fact that some of the minor ghosts can be obliterated quite easily.

And this doesn't even take into account the boss fights. In any event, the key point is that I never got bored with grappling ghosts into the trap.

Dislikes!
AI - I know its very easy to bash AI and that all of the reviews have already done so - but its just not possible to comment on this game without mentioning the AI. In short, the AI of your squadmates really is atrociously bad.

There are a couple of areas near the end of the campaign where you literally spend more time running around trying to heal the other ghostbusters than you do shooting at ghosts. In fact, there were a couple of times when all I did was run around healing ghostbusters (eventually the ghosts knocked me down and I had to reload as, without me healing them, everybody else died within 2-3 seconds). This just shouldn't happen - not even if you are playing on the hardest difficulty setting.

PS If you have watched Yahtzee's review of the game, his description of "retard roundup" is absolutely spot on.

Rookie - The other thing I disliked was the fact that you played a nameless mute. Throughout the entire game, you never speak and are only ever referred to as rookie, intern, new guy etc etc. I've heard all the reasons why this was done (eg to not taint the original ghostbusters, to let people be the rookie without breaking their immersion and, based on the end credits, to set up possible game sequels where the "rookie" sets up a new ghostbusters franchise in a different city) but really, what a cop-out. It really made the cutscenes and story feel weaker for having them jump around the 5th mute ghostbuster.

No coop - This isn't really a dislike per se. However, I really think they missed an opportunity here as I think this would have made a great co-op game.


Overall, a thumbs up from the Meister and a recommendation for you to play this game - but only if you can identify who made the below quotes!

"Yes, its true. This man has no dick."
"Listen ... do you smell something?"
"I'm terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought"
"when someone asks you if you're a God, you say YES!"