Written by mikedadude From CMFrenzy Well, it’s been almost a week since the first copies of the FM Live Beta were handed out, and one reason you may have heard so little about it is because it’s so
addictive. I seem to be one of the moderate users and I’m averaging around 30 games a day! Crazy! Well, I’ll just give you a quick glance into the beta, and over the next months I shall be looking at each aspect of the game individually. So let's go to the beginning...
Here you can see that at the beginning you have several options and that upon the sign-in option it will be via email/password. Fairly straight-forward.
On this next screenshot you can see how you have the options of forming multiple squads. The plus side to this is that you can make u21, u19, u17 squads as you wish. Why is this important? In the game, it is possible to make competitions ranging from only for “senior” (any age) players, to u21, u20, u19, u18, and u17. Something which you will most definitely want to do as this will be a breeding ground for future stars.
Next up – You can change your stadium dimensions, names, and design of the pitch. At the current moment there a quite a few “corridor” and “boxes” stadiums being used since these are legal according to UEFA rules, but once the federations are activated in the beta and people create stadium rules to be accepted into the federation, these should quickly evaporate - pretty nifty feature though I must admit.
Now let’s check the profile – similar to the snapshot in FM. Fairly straight-forward again, you have the personal information regarding yourself, the team details. Oh – I found it pretty cool how you could change the badge of your team, and you can also change your profile picture along with your club colours. Then of course there’s a rather pointless statement box.
Perhaps the odd one of you is wondering about the
preferences? Well I don’t need to explain that now do I, only thing I will say is that the game is 9 months away so expect a lot of changes to everything.
Now with that all aside let’s have a glance at my squad. However, I did restart shortly after as I was losing too many games for my liking. See – the game has a cool feature it’s called... “restart”. Anyway, what this does is it releases all your players and prevents you from signing them for the next 7 days, keeps your finances intact, your competition places, everything. Only thing it does is release the players in your team and resets your rankings. This is a very useful tool. Anyhow! Back to the screenshot, one can see the similarity to FM07, one thing you will notice is that the contract expiry all says “tomorrow” this is because I have yet to confirm the squad. You can only play games once you’ve confirmed a squad. After confirming a squad you can’t sign players on a free anymore, instead you have to compete in wage auction bids.
Moving on, let’s have a look at the financial aspect of the game. This is somewhat buggy and does need to be fixed – so I’ll leave this out for now :P If you want to have a look at screenshots then:
screenshot1 and
screenshot2. I won’t go through explaining them as it’s straight forward and at the moment a tad bit confusing and will most likely be changed by the time FM Live goes… live.
Enough of that,
let’s check out how the matches look! Well instantly you can see that you see the chat box and pitch at all times, I know in that screenshot it shows possession but during the game it shows the 2d pitch. You have the option to see 2d pitch (only highlights) or watch commentary, as for speed you can have it set at normal
* Bozzadium/fast – with both players having to set it at the same speed in order for it to go at that speed. Personally I find normal too slow and most players tend to go with fast speed. Some of you may be wondering about the “place money” box, well you can place a bet for your team to win the match either before kick-off or at half-time. This is a cool feature that I rarely use, as I’m not good enough to be that cocky. Here are some more screenshots:
How about player profiles? Well there are no pictures, hopefully won’t be as a lot of the real life players will retire after a couple months and "newgens" will take their place, 1 real month equates to one game year, so it’s always best to invest in the wonderkids of tomorrow rather than the stars of today.
If any of you are interested, it is very similar to the FM07 style. Maybe you want to find out about the other games that are going on, how do you do that? Easy! Click the world button and then latest scores (not that that helps you guys who don’t have the beta). You can also view any game, past or present.
Screenshot! Well, that’s it for now. Expect more to come later as I will tear apart different aspects of the game.
For more news on Football Manager Live go to their website
Football Manager Live 
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FM: Live - A Beta Tester's Insight 
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