One of the things that the people behind the remarkably successful Football Manager series have learned is that when they bring out the new season edition, people will buy it. But it’s not just a case of people buying any old crap: it’s a case of people buying it because they have a history of producing the best football management sims out there, and so people have come to expect a high quality game.

I do know somewhat of which I speak — I have been playing the game since its earliest incarnation as “Championship Manager” (although I would suggest that they weren’t really producing the best quality football sims until the next version — Championship Manager ’93. So in that respect I’ve been playing the football sims these people have produced for 16 years.

Bloody hell. When I think of all the time I’ve spent doing that, I could have actually done something constructive with my life.

Of course, that’s only if you assume that building a quality Newcastle team capable of winning trophy after trophy (even if it is only on my PC) is not something constructive. And for the rest of you afficionados, you might be content with my brief review: “yeah, it’s good” — before rushing off to order Football Manager 2010 for yourself.

If, however, you’d like to know what I thought of it first, then read on…

Well, all I can say, having played as Newcastle is that the realism is stunning. Not only will Ashley not allow the manager any money at all for transfers, he expects you to finish top of the Championship with a paper-thin squad. If that wasn’t realistic enough, my Newcastle side started off the season with a 1-1 draw away to West Brom, followed by 3-0, 2-0 and 2-0 wins against Reading, Sheffield Wednesday and Crystal Palace.

As usual, they’ve tinkered with the screen layout slightly, and have the tooltip affair which may be helpful to any beginners, but anyone who has played the game before might as well just switch this off — you should find your way around without any problems.

The 3D match engine hasn’t changed much (I still prefer the ‘elevated’ view) but one key thing has changed: rather than just being a pitch with advertising hoardings around, you now have a view of the stadium and the crowds. In this example, you can see Peter Lovenkrands crossing for Nile Ranger to score a diving header and get Newcastle off to a good start in the pre-season friendly against Falkirk.

Depending on the stadium, and the team, you’ll see different actions (fans cheering a goal and so on) as well as stadiums which are virtually full to those which are half-empty. It’s a nice touch.

Not so useful however is the “back room analysis”. The idea behind it is quite useful: it compares your team against the team you are about to play, tells you where relative advantages and disavantages lie — in this example I have a height, strength, speed, aggression and determination advantage over the team I’m about to play. Less useful is what you can do with this advice: you are simply directed to visit your tactics screen whereas some suggestions by your assistant or coaches would be more useful “try to play a controlling game; we don’t want these to hit us on the break” or similar.

Secondly, there’s the goal analysis. This simply tells you which 15-minute segment of the game the opposition have scored and conceded the most goals in. Really, what is the point of this? Without any further information (“team tires easily, likely to concede goals at the end particularly against fresh, fast players”) it’s just bonkers statistics. It would be fine for the media to quote it, but why on earth would my assistant manager feel it necessary to bring this to my attention unless he had something useful to add?

However, despite my quibble over this “backroom analysis” stuff, I do have to say that I very much like what they have done with the tactics screen. Instead of the previous thing, where you have arrows drawn forward and backward all over the shop to tell people to drop back (or run forward) depending on who has position, you know assign players to a particular role associated with the part of the pitch they are in.

For example, for a person playing right-hand side of midfield, you’ve got winger, right-midfielder or defensive winger: for your centre halves, you can decide who is a ball-playing central defender providing more deep-lying cover, and who is your stopper; there’s roles such as ‘ball winning midfielder’, ‘box to box midfielder’ and so on, and the number of different roles available to your centre forwards really need to be seen to be believed…

Of course, getting all of this right will improve how effectively your team plays, and might even result in you scraping past Coventry on a wet wednesday evening at the Ricoh. I suspect that this is one of these things that will eat up even more of your time as you attempt to tweak your formations and methods of play until it is just so.

So be warned: this game will take over your life; eat into all of your free time, and no doubt put a strain on your ability to carry on a meaningful relationship with anyone but your computer. But if you’ve played Football Manager before, that’s just the way (ah-ha ah-ha) you like it.

Get the game, get playing, and I’ll see you on the other side.

The tricky bit is trying to make a post about boredom interesting. Because that’s the one thing that being bored isn’t. There are no books I’m particularly feeling inspired to pick up at the minute (it’s not that I’ve not got unread books — there are about a dozen on my TBR pile, only I don’t really feeling like reading at the minute. I don’t particularly feel like playing a computer game; there’s fuck-all on telly (to give you some idea how desperate it is, I’ve got the X-factor on at the moment).

So, having filled the dishwasher, emptied out the washing machine, and checked my emails half a dozen times, I’ve decided to go to bed. The theory being that if I’m asleep, I’ll not notice I’m bored. There is of course one rather significant drawback with this plan. I’m a nightowl, and it is extremely rare that I’ll be asleep before midnight (frequently two or three a.m.), so going to bed before half-past eight is likely to find me horizontal, awake, and still bored.

Of course, what I’m doing at precisely this minute is typing up a blog post, which I suppose is hardly conducive to going to sleep (and if I do drop off, I’ll end up with qwertyitis anyway). But I’m not really that physically tired: it’s more that my brain just wants to switch off and find something to be entertainingly diverted by for a couple of hours.

For me, blogging normally fits that requirement. It’s not something that seems like work; there’s no real effort involved; the words just arrange themselves up into sentences in my head and then through the magic of typing and just a little bit of computery goodness, they find themselves floating about on the screen in front of me.

Unfortunately, as I end up thinking about whatever I’m blogging about, in this case it is just serving to remind me that I am bored. I did get diverted into a brief discussion of the fantasy board game Talisman (fantasy in this case being swords and sorcery, rather than nudey ladies — although if anyone does have a board game that comes with free nudey ladies, I might be interested in that also…) which occupied a certain amount of my time (and caused many late nights) during my late teens through to university life.

I even got sufficiently distracted to download the PC version of the board game and give it a go, although this suffers from one major flaw. It really is a multiple-player game, and it takes a certain amount of the fun out of it, playing two of your own characters against one another. Ideally you want three to five people, a big table with the board laid out on it, some beer, and about ten hours you don’t ever want to see again. Then you can play Talisman.

Although the unofficial PC version was kinda fun from a reminiscency point of view, it wasn’t as much fun as actually playing the board game with real people would have been. Now a proper, turn-based version of that board game available online to play with others around the world; that would be something worth playing.

A board game for the bored, indeed. So thank you to Mr. Wood from distracting me from my boredom and getting me to try and remember the rules of Talisman (considering the last time I played was about 13 years ago, it’s surprising how much I remembered!).

If I was to say “give me an evil prophetess with the runesword every time…”, I bet there would be a few people out there who would know what I was talking about

The “kids” got Mario Kart for the Wii for Christmas. It’s the game where you plug the Wiimote into a driving wheel, and basically drive around with that.

It’s also bloody good fun. If you have a Wii, and I had to recommend one game, this is the game I would choose (although I also have a soft spot for the star wars lego). The reason? It’s simple to grasp. You use the wheel to steer around, and you have an accelerate and a brake button (although I’m not sure that I’ve ever pressed the brake). But while it’s simple to grasp, it’s not quite so easy to master.

Initially, it seems like you have sixteen tracks to race around, 18 vehicles to ride (6 per character ‘size’), and 8 characters to choose from. However, as you progress through the game, you can unlock additional vehicles (32 in all), additional characters (26 in all), and additional tracks (32 in all). You can for example, unlock the chance to play with your Mii as the character, which is quite good fun.

You also have the option of using automatic or manual drift. Automatic is simpler, and is the one for me, because I keep forgetting to press the button when using manual drift, but manual drift has its advantages — used properly it can give you mini turbo boosts which can easily be the difference between finishing first, or … not.

Collecting bonuses is part of the fun too: different bonuses can be collected — from homing shells which target your nearby fellow drivers and temporarily knock them over (either giving you the chance to get away from them or catch them), bananas you can drop on the racetrack to make cars skid, or a magic bullet which you can pick up if you are towards the back of the race, which temporarily improves your speed, drives around the track for you and makes you invulnerable (and capable of knocking other cars off the track). As you get used to the bonuses, you get to know how — and when — to use them.

So while the game is easy to pick up, there are three main difficulty levels — 50cc races, 100cc races, and 150cc races. Basically, as you get better at the steering and the tactics, you can step up the difficulty levels: at the higher cc races, your opponents are better: seemingly better at timing their use of bonuses against you, less likely to make mistakes, and generally faster.

I got the The kids got the game six months ago — Santa brung it, as I recall — and yet it’s still one that they like to come back to and play. And every time they pick it up, it makes me want a turn. And finally, last night, I took part in the Lightning Cup at the 150cc level and won it for the first time (winning, in this case, means topping the leaderboard after four races — getting the gold). This completed my victories in every grand prix at the 150cc level (I’ve also won all at the 50cc and 100cc, but that’s to be expected as they are easier than the 150cc).

I’m not telling you this just because I’m smug about it (although that is no doubt a factor).

No, the important thing about this is that it unlocked Mirror Mode. This is another set of races, I’m not entirely sure whether the drivers are better again than at 150cc, or if I’ve dropped a place or two on average because the courses are reversed, so the turns and corners aren’t as I expect them. Yup, that’s right. Mirror mode means you’re driving around the courses in the other direction, which is kinda fun, if a little confusing…

There’s also a lot of sites where you can find “cheats” for Mario Kart Wii. Only they aren’t “cheats” at all. For example, being told “win all 150cc cups to unlock mirror mode” does not actually unlock mirror mode for you, nor does it make it any easier to win all the 150cc cups. And all the cheats for Mario Kart Wii are of this nature (“Unlock King Boo: Win the 50cc Star Cup. Alternately, win 750 races.”). The so-called cheats don’t actually make playing the game any easier, but they do give you an incentive: you can know which unlock character/ vehicle/ race you’re working towards.

And that is what keeps you wanting to play the one player mode: unlocking new stuff. I’ve won all of the 50cc cups, all of the 100cc cups, all of the 150cc cups, but there are still characters and vehicles left to unlock. And that’s just in one-player mode.

Where the game really comes into its own is two player mode, when you’re racing split-screen against a friend, relative or small child. It’s simply brilliant. If you have a Wii, this is the one game you must own. Make sure you get a second wheel, though — it’s much more fun with the driving wheels.

The problem is that both sides have a point. The reason that gamers are stereotyped as such is because many of them do fit this description, but many people enjoy online gaming and manage to have friendships, relationships and even children in the real world. But that’s the point. These people aren’t the ones who are the addicts.

The term addiction is also sometimes applied to compulsions that are not substance-related, such as problem gambling and computer addiction. In these kinds of common usages, the term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences to the individual’s health, mental state or social life.Wikipedia: Addict

So if you play online games to the extent that it may have harmful consequences to your health, mental state or social life, you may well be an addict.

For example, it’s easy enough to make the case that this South Korean was an addict:

A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.BBC News: S Korean dies after games session

But most people won’t be that bad. It’s like alcholism: some studies suggest that as many as 8 million people in the England have some form of alcohol dependency (at the lower end of the ‘alcoholic’ scale). Now I’m not entirely sure how they rank ‘dependency’ in this case, as 8 million seems rather a lot, but I’m presuming ‘gaming dependency’ can be treated as a similar continuum.

If you are working from the logic that it may be harmful to your health, mental state or social life, then you don’t necessarily need to be doing it all night every night to be on that scale.

The BBC editors blog covered the story in more detail, quoting from who said:

…teenagers lived their lives almost exclusively in this virtual world, falling behind with their studies, damaging their health, and failing to engage with their peers in the real world.BBC Editors: Addicted to Warcraft?

Apart from the obvious fact that no-one has ever known a teenager who lives his life in the real world, being generally too full of hormones, angst and frequently alcohol, this is obviously a serious issue. The whole point of computer games is that they should be fun to play. That they should make you want to play again.

This is particularly true for the subscription-based games (you pay £40 for the game then another £7 per month or whatever), as opposed to the one-off purchase type. In these games, if you aren’t playing, you aren’t paying, so it’s in the interests of the games companies to make games that you want to play as regularly as possible. As an aside, I refuse to buy this sort of game on the basis that I object to paying a continuing fee once I’ve paid for the bloody game in the first place.

But whether a game is subscription-based or not, a game that you are going to want to play repeatedly is going to be better-liked, and get better reviews than one which isn’t. Simply because it is obviously more fun to play.

When I was at school, I played computer games a lot. But there were also kids who could be described as having a ‘football addiction’, playing football every night to the detriment of their schoolwork. That’s no different in principle from gaming (except that it’s obviously healthier).

Again, parents have to take some responsibility when children are involved.

Blizzard, the makers of World of Warcraft, say the game has been given a “rest” system, which rewards players for taking a break. Paul Sams of Blizzard says parents have also been empowered: “We’ve put in a robust parental control system so that parents can control how much time their kids play, and when they play and it’s all managed.BBC Editors: Addicted to Warcraft?

So if parents have the power to limit their kids use of the games, and choose not to, aren’t the parents partially to blame? It’s like parents who complain that Grand Theft Auto is too violent for their 12-year old whom they bought it for because the shop wouldn’t sell it to the kid, what with it having an age rating on it. Or the parents who complain that Flesh Eating Zombies IV is too violent for their nine year old, after renting it for them…

Even going back to the days of the ZX Spectrum, “addictive qualities” were something that you specifically looked for in a game (See Crash! review of Cybernoid from 1988). Because you don’t want to pay money for a game that you don’t want to play very much… you want to get one you’ll love to play over and over. The more addictive a game is, the more you’ll like it, the better reviews it will get, and the more successful it will be.

When I was a student, I was slightly addicted to an online text-based game called Viking MUD. I would be found playing on this when I should have been working, and sometimes I played through the night as “Mangelwurzel” (along with SY, with only coffee to keep us going). This was a text based precursor to the more fancy modern World of Warcraft stuff (and, I believe, is still going).

I played so much because I enjoyed it. Now I don’t. I have other things to spend my time on, like work, kids, and er… blogging every day.

But people become addicted to lots of things: usually to something that gives them some sort of pleasurable ‘buzz’ which they then miss when they are not doing it (even if there is no chemical addiction involved). You get compulsive gamblers; why not compulsive games-players? It may well be cheaper.

I’m not entirely sure what point I’m trying to make here: something along the lines of “yes, of course it’s possible to be addicted to computer games, why is everyone so surprised?” with a hint of “just because you play computer games doesn’t necessarily make you a sad case”. Oh, and possibly a touch of “but you should watch what you’re doing with any activity”. Only with added rambling thrown in…

Nope, I downloaded the demo, same as everyone else. The demo is available from the Football Manager site, and it comes in two ‘flavours’. The vanilla flavour offers just the English and Scottish leagues, it doesn’t have many pictures, and it weighs in at around 170Mb. The strawberry flavour includes lots of leagues (all of them?), more pictures, logos and so forth, but weighs in at a rather considerable 1Gb in size.

Despite only wanting to manage in the English Premiership (Haway the toon!), I decided to go for the strawberry version anyway, on pretty much the basis of “me wants it”. So I set up my manager, started as manager of Newcastle United, and got cracking.

The question is, what did I think of it?

Well, I noticed one problem immediately: Damien Duff was due to miss 5 months with an injury that I rather suspected was the one he had in August 2007 — as he’s certainly been playing for Newcastle this season. Other than that, I didn’t notice any problems with the Newcastle team.

Well, I didn’t notice any other inaccurate problems with the Newcastle team. They have no money to spend, have a woefully thin squad, have about five players out of contract at the end of the season, have a chairman is trying to sell the club yet still expects a top half finish as a minimum. Although on the bright side, it is you, rather than Dennis Wise, who gets to choose which players to buy and sell.

One of the first differences you notice is the press conference. You’ll no doubt be sat down and asked some questions about what your plans are when you take control of a club, and at least for this press conference, you can’t fob them off with the assistant manager.

This particular example is a pre-match press conference part way through the season, where I’m being bombarded with really tricky questions by the press, such as “the fans say player X is playing well at the moment; do you think this will help him play better?”. You also have the option of offering ‘no comment’, or even storming out of the press conference if the journalists are particularly getting on your nerves (although I’ve not tried this yet!).

The second difference you’ll notice, and probably the most striking although it’s really a cosmetic difference rather than a difference to the game-play, is the change to the in-game match engine. Those of you who have played other versions of FM will be used to the 2D match engine, with little circles representing the players. While this frequently looks like Andy Gray’s tactics counters on acid, it has in fact been great for gameplay: you can see who is making runs, where they are making them, who is being successful with their passes, who is and isn’t winning headers and so on.

Which is why I was a little sceptical of the new 3D engine, thinking that as soon as they started prioritising fancy looking graphics ahead of the gameplay, tactics and management options, they were going down the wrong road. Fortunately, I was wrong.

For a start, while it may be 3D, the graphics are hardly fancy; they are probably the equivalent to the early versions of Sensible Soccer, and they do actually help; it’s easier to see whether you’ve just lost the ball because your player was tackled or beaten in the air, and it’s nice to watch the goals.

In the example above, we have Shola Ameobi, having come off the bench because of injury, scoring the only goal of the match against Sunderland to win the derby. Nice one, Shola! Although I must admit I’m not entirely sure why, when Newcastle were at home, we had to wear that revolting purple strip as opposed to the standard black and white stripes…

The match stats also shows extra features; you can now see the number of “blocked shots” and “clear cut chances” each side has had. I did particularly enjoy mugging Chelsea 1-0, when they had 7 ‘clear cut chances’ and I had one shot (which obviously went in) which wasn’t even described as clear cut. Unfortunately, that luck was not to last against Arsenal in the next game…

However, you will also have noted that the in-game view takes up almost all of the window (in the new ‘TV mode’: you can still play in ‘classic mode’ with the menus down the side). If you are playing in TV mode, you can open and close little mini-windows which overlay the screen, so you can keep an eye on the match stats, how well your players are performing, or even look at some of the new options, such as how confident and well motivated your players are, or what your assistant manager thinks…

The chairman selling up thing almost became an issue for me half-a-dozen games in, when it was announced that the club was on a brink of a takeover, and the new chairman wanted Hristo Stoichkov as his manager. Fortunately — and seemingly exactly like real life — the takeover bids mentioned in the in-game press ended up coming to nothing, and Ashley is still in charge, still looking to sell up…

People who are fans of the Football Manager series will probably buy this game anyway just to have the latest version (yes, I am talking to you Anthony). People who don’t like management sims won’t buy it — and certainly shouldn’t, as despite the new whizzo in-game engine it is still very much a management sim: it’s not gone all player-manager, you understand!

However, is it worth buying? Well, even assuming you could the new data (i.e. the transfers, promotions/relegations etc) without the game, I’d say a definite yes. The addition of press conferences, and the new match engine are definite improvements, and there have been numerous other little tweaks and touches which makes it look and play better than the previous versions.

Best of all, there’s no need to buy it unless you’re convinced you want it. The demo game (which, if you remember, can be downloaded from the Football Manager site) can be played for half a season (you can play 19 League games and the 3rd round of the FA Cup), and the save game is supposedly compatible with the final version, so you can try it for yourself before you need to make any decisions as to whether or not you want to buy it.

As for me… well, let’s just say that I’ve got a League Cup Semi-Final against Fulham I’m itching to play. Maybe then the board will give me some bloody money for transfers…

The British Red Cross have launched a website called Traces of Hope, which they say is the first “charity Alternate Reality Game”, in order to:

…raise awareness about victims of war, in which the object is to help a displaced Ugandan boy find his mother.BBC News: Internet Game for Victims of War

Sounds interesting, eh?

Vicious war in Northern Uganda has destroyed Joseph’s home and torn his family apart. He has one goal, to find out from the Red Cross if his mother is alive or dead.

Now he has arrived in the dangerous refugee camp they call Hopetown, he has 24 hours to track down the Red Cross messenger and he needs you to be his guide.

He has a satellite phone, you have the web – together you’ll make a great team. Time is running out; guide Joseph through sickness, fire and violence as together you follow his traces of hope.

Traces of Hope

What are you waiting for? Sign up!

Those of you who know me know I like word games, so when I found a little application on Facebook where it gives you six letters and you’ve got to make as many words out of that as possible to score points, I was bound to be interested.

There are various bonuses to be obtained — a four letter word will give you an extra 2 seconds play time, whereas a five letter word will give you an extra 3 seconds time and a six letter word will give you the extra three seconds plus a bonus round where you have to unscramble one of your friends names.

I’m quite smug about the fact that I’m sitting out there on 36,000 points, some 15,000 clear of my nearest friend, and that I’ve qualified as an anagram cyborg (the highest grade). However, I do recognise that it’s only a game and also that some people have scored comfortably over 200,000+ points (some are reporting 1,000,000+ points) but even if I could keep gaining bonus time, I don’t think I would have the patience to sit at the computer for that length of time…

I do like the ranking system though — depending on how many points you score, it describes your vocabulary as being equivalent to various things including a mime or a playground bully (poor scores), through a celebrity chef and a circus ringleader, through lawyer, librarian, scribe and scientist, philosopher and what I had assumed to be the top grade — poet (as all the other grades cover a range of about 800 points, and this one goes from 20,800 all the way up to 29,999).

If you’re already on facebook, and you like word games, why not give this one a try? Only don’t beat my score else I’ll feel obliged to waste even more of my time trying to get the high score amongst my friends again…

more than 75% of parents are concerned about the content of video games played by their childrenBBC News

Sorry? In every computer games shop I’ve ever been into in the last ten years, I’ve seen staff refusing to sell children games on at least one occassion because the children weren’t old enough for the age rating of the game.

If the bloody parents didn’t buy them the age-inappropriate games in the first place, they wouldn’t be playing them, would they? But far too often I have seen parents in games shops, with an eleven year old kid in tow buying the latest blood and guts Doom clone for their offspring, because they’ve said they will buy them a game, and seem to blissfully ignore the fact that it’s 18-rated.

Try this one: would I be happy to let my four year old watch Postman Pat or something with a name like Cannibal Vixen Flesh Eating Zombie Holocaust? Would I take him to see a film at the cinema classified as “suitable for all” or would I take him to see one “for over 18s only”? Well, as I’m a responsible parent (or at least I’d like to think so), I’d be going for the first option in each case.

It’s why I’ll let my boys play Wii Sports but not Resident Evil 4…

The problem is that a lot of adults walk around with their brains switched off. They see “computer game” and immediately register “fine for the kiddies”, despite the fact it’s marked 18 and got some flesh-eating zombie on the front of the box. Alternatively they’ll let their children watch (or read) Manga because it’s a cartoon (or comic), oblivious to the fact that it’s generally got a remarkably high sex-and-violence count.

The sooner that parents get their heads around the idea that if it’s got an age rating on it you should take note as opposed to living in some cotton-wool padded dreamland where anything in a comic strip or on a computer game is perfectly acceptable to kids, the better off they’d be. It would maybe also help if they took an interest in their children, because then they’d know the sort of games their children were playing with.

Maybe then they’d accept that they actually ought to accept some of the responsibility for what games they buy their children? If you wouldn’t pay for your children to go and see Night of the Living Flesh Axe Murderer VII: Extended Gore Edition (rated 18), then don’t bloody well buy them an 18-rated game. Or, if you do choose to let them watch/play that, don’t bloody well complain about it afterwards…

I love football games. I always have. But the problem I’ve had with football games over the last ten years or so is that they are all somehow tainted. Basically, because they aren’t Sensi Soccer, they aren’t as good.

I don’t really want a game that’s going to take me a week and a half to figure out how to make the player step forward without leaving the ball behind, even if the graphics are so good that you can make out every pore on Wayne Rooney’s nose. What I want is a game that I can just pick up and play.

Ideally, it ought to be better than Sensi Soccer because it ought to have different skill levels that range from absolute beginner through to expert so that I’m not getting thumped five nil in my first three games (thank you very much Kick Off 2) until I get the hang of it, but also so that it doesn’t reach a stage where I can regularly win the European Cup with Distillery (a small Northern Irish football team who I managed to repeatedly take to European Success in “World of Sensible Soccer”).

So there were a lot of expectations resting on FIFA 2008 for the Wii. Did it deliver?

Yup.

After about five hours of consecutive gameplay I can now pass (not through balls, mind you), shoot “with finesse” or “power shots”, and I can take throw ins and penalties. I can also make sliding tackles with a reasonable degree of success (I win the ball more often than I get sent off). What I can’t do yet is take free kicks or corners well, or do any of the fancy stuff like flicks, crosses and lobs.

Although to be honest I’m having so much fun playing with the basics, I don’t need to get to the fancy dan stuff yet. I’m eleven games into a Premiership season and already Newcastle are sitting top of the league with twenty nine points (having drawn with both Manchester clubs and beaten everyone else), including a 6-2 victory over Sunderland after being 2-1 down at half-time.

I’ve also progressed from the “family” control method (suitable for uncles, aunties and not-very-often players) where you just wave the Wiimote around and the computer moves your players automatically) to the Wiimote-and-nunchuk method where you are — theoretically at least — im full control of your players.

I’ve been playing it so much, I’ve given myself a sore thumb. (Basically, you use the nunchuck controller for making your players run around, and aiming on set pieces, and you wave the Wiimote around and/or press buttons on it to pass, shoot, tackle etc. It’s all tremendous fun, and while the graphics aren’t great, they’re still pretty good. And let’s face it, if it was graphics you were after, you would have bought a Playstation 3. You want entertaining football gameplay at a level of playability not seen since the days of Sensible Soccer.

And, while that might be a bold claim now (let’s see whether it’s a game I’m still playing in six months, first), it strikes me as being the first football playing game that I’ve encountered since then that might be able to challenge Sensi for my personal title as best football (playing) game ever.

I do have a couple of minor quibbles though: my wingers seem to swap sides every now and again, and similarly if I change anything about my team, my formation tends to revert to 4-3-3 for some unknown reason — although either of these could quite possibly be caused by me. But it’s great fun, you can play all sorts of leagues and competitions, build your own custom competitions, there’s a table football simulation you can play with the Wiimote (yes, really) and there’s even some sort of online stuff, although I’ve not looked into that yet.

So don’t wait any longer. Go and buy it now.

What I mean by fantasy in this case is a semi-medieval setting, with castles, knights, crossbows and swords and suits of armour, only with added wizards, goblins, ogres and dragons. And what I meant by a Role-Playing Game (RPG) is a game where you sit around with your mates with sheets of paper, dice, pencils — and usually beer — and talk about which orc you’re wanting to cast your fireball spell at. Dungeons & Dragons is the classic example of a fantasy role-playing game.

It’s also a game traditionally associated with teenagers and young adults, probably because after that people have more demands on their time and sometimes think that now they’re grown up, they’re not allowed to have an imagination, or even fun, any more.

What is it?

Basically, D&D is like a free-form, team version of the gaming books I discussed a couple of days ago. In practice, you takes your group of mates, and allocates one to be the GM (or DM). This person is normally the one who knows the rules best, is capable of holding a narrative and can improvise when necessary (because it’s somewhere between a rules-bound game and team based storytelling, a good GM will know when to bend or ignore the rules to improve the story).

The GM needs to describe everything the players encounter; decide how they will interact with the players, decide on tactics and strategy for the monsters (but remember he’s not trying to beat the players; he’s playing with them), and decide how monsters and other characters will react in a variety of different circumstances.

A good GM can make a game. A bad one will break it. I was usually GM for my groups because of my knowledge and in-grained understanding of the rules, plus the fact I enjoyed it. Whether I was good or bad I’ll leave to my former players to decide (but I was good, really).

Also, the GM has access to information not privy to the other players (what is the source of those scratching noises behind that strange, lichen-covered door, for example), and so you will generally find that one person takes on the role of GM for a group, and that the others act as standard players throughout that campaign (which may last anywhere between a single gaming session of three hours, or twice a week for six years).

Basically, the GM will tell the players what is happening, and what they see, and the players will tell the GM how they intend to react to it: will they open that lichen-covered door? Will they call out, to ask if there is anyone on the other side? Or will they stand back a couple of yards and cast that fireball spell…

What would you do?

I hope you didn’t choose the fireball spell. Turns out that if you didn’t want to be caught in your own fireball’s blast radius, you’d have needed to have backed a good bit further down the corridor…

Generally, when the players decide what they want to do, you’ll assign their actions a probability of success (either off the top of your head, or according to some pre-defined rule) and then either you or them will roll a die to see if they are successful.

As the player characters solve more puzzles and defeat more monsters, they accumulate experience points which can be ‘cashed in’ to improve their characters skills, fighting abilities, range of spells or similar. Therefore the longer a character has been going, the more powerful they will have become, and also the more customised by the person playing them they will have become. You can develop quite an emotional attachment to “Geoff the Barbarian” after a while…

The Dice

RPG dice come in a variety of shapes and sizes and indeed this is one of the ways you can tell whether or not someone is a ‘gamer’. If they have a box of dice somewhere in their house of assorted shapes and sizes.

I have:

• Three pyramid-shaped four-sided dice
• Twenty-two standard six-sided dice
• Eleven eight-sided dice
• Nine standard ten-sided dice
• Two ten-sided dice marked in tens from 00 to 90
• Eight twelve-sided dice
• Fifteen standard twenty-sided dice
• Eight twenty-sided dice marked from 0-9 twice

Another gamer giveaway is the use of ‘die notation’. It’s a bit unwieldy to say “roll three eight-sided dice and add four” (particularly if you’re going to be doing it repeatedly over the course of an evening) so the gamer would usually say “roll 3d8+4″ instead.

If you’re wondering how come I’ve managed to get almost eighty dice, it’s because I’ve been accumulating them for some time. I picked up my first Dungeons & Dragons (the red-boxed ‘basic’ set) in 1983 shortly after my eighth birthday — which obviously came with some dice — and they’ve just sort of accumulated ever since…

Roleplaying Across All Of Time And Space

Roleplaying games are available across a variety of genres and playing worlds: you can invetigate horrific otherworldly entities in the 1920s, should you choose to play Call of Cthulhu game based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos; you can play a Hobbit in Middle Earth Role Play; play the classic Dungeons & Dragons or the simpler equivalent Tunnels and Trolls; you can solve crimes as a Mega City Judge in either of the Paranoia, and this is only a subset of the games that I myself owned.

…and that’s before mentioning the “Fighting Fantasy” role-playing game, based on the game books I was discussing the other day. Or Dragon Warriors. Or Palladium. Or GURPS. Or Cyberpunk. Or Elric (as in “of Melniboné” and the Michael Moorcock novels). Or Runequest. Or that one I can’t remember where you were a superhero. Again, all games with their own rule systems that I owned.

There was even Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG long before there was a kiddies cartoon series or a film. This was one of the — seeming few — that I didn’t have.

Role-Playing Today

To some extent, the traditional pen, paper and dice RPGs have been deposed by the higher-quality computer games available today, because with high-powered computing and broadband it’s possible to play games across the internet which you don’t need to be described to you — because you can see the graphics — because you can still interact and form teams with other real people (or rather, with the characters controlled by real people) because the in-game communications are sufficiently sophisticated; because you still have the opportunity for in-game development and to improve your character.

All great fun to play, no doubt.

But I’ve still got my Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks around somewhere, and I’m missing it a bit. Is anyone up for a game?