Article From A Scene Preacher Man

To readers of this post before this message was posted up I’d like to say sorry for the stupid mistakes I made in this article. Sigh.

I am the sad scene preacher man, listen to my word.

Firstly I hope you’ve taken note of changes to the site, in the fact that we are now officially linked to Footygamer and we are looking to contributions from you talented viewers of the site. Now onwards from that, I’ve gone back to my Football Manager Community article roots today – and I have produced the first scene article for this place since a while back. Firstly though I’ll guide you to this:

Everyones A Blogger

It’s not going to be regular event that I post up this many rather useless news pieces on my site – but sadly it is necessary to do it again. Well not sadly actually because both my pieces of news are good for the Football Manager blogging community, and therefore this site.

I’ve gone affiliate crazy and have pledged my sites name into two new projects, an ambitious new community wordpress ‘forum’ that just might work and an scene old timer trying to revive itself. So yesterday a few sites of the blog community received an e-mail containing a piece of long awaited and expected news (for the ones who read Blog FM anyway) – The Editor was starting up a new Blogging paradise, The Football Manager WordPress Community…

Discussion: National Team Management

It’d be a crime if I didn’t use that image – its so overused.

Now back to the content for today and I’m looking at a quite widely discussed issue (well, I’ve seen an article on it, snippets in others etc.) – features of a national team manager. There is a severe lack of things to do really if you choose to become manager of the National Team in FM 2007. Let’s hope this ‘discussion’ goes better than the last one you bloody miserable lot..

So, How You Doing?

This post is generally pointless and was meant to be including in an article, but it made it too long so I thought I’d inform you of some things going on separately..

Firstly, as a quick note I have two pieces of info for you today. Firstly, on Sunday thanks to a swarm of hits from TI (you’ll never guess what was the most read article..) this site has official debuted in the Top 100 list of growing WordPress Blogs at a reasonable #29. This is great and has pleased me no end, and it shows that with a little bit of advertising (cheers Cleon) you can really boost the old hit meter. So, feel free to advertise this place on any FM sites I haven’t already hit – there are plenty, and some like GK have posting limits (bah) which I can’t be bothered to abide too.

Secondly, if anyone would like to contribute to the site I’d be most grateful and all. As you can see content is going along pretty fine at the moment but there are times when I have nothing to say – really – and any assistance from the scene folk is always welcome. So don’t be tight fisted, send me any pieces you think are up to scratch and I’ll review them and post them if I think there amazingly brilliantly beautiful crafted pieces of elegant writing. In other words – give me your articles bitches. Who knows, if you’re great enough perhaps I could give you article posting privileges as long as I trust you not to fuck the place up.

Pro’s and Con’s For The Portable Manager

Before we start, interesting design we have at the moment eh? I fancied a change; the last one was a bit dark. Please give feedback, because in all honesty it was my fourth choice as both Pitchside and Blog FM have the other good ones I was after. It could do with a new header if anyones interested. Thought not. I’m not too sure about it..

Let’s be brief today, I can’t be bothered with much more. After little testing, much aggravation and numerous urges to swear loudly I have concluded this about the PSP portable version of FM 2007 – Football Manager 2007 Handheld is, to put it simply, average. I gathered this opinion after probably half an hour of non-continuous play time. Why? Because it’s not on the computer to put it simply. I’ve got to used to the PC game and this PSP version doesn’t have the easy to use slick inter-surface, the ‘clicky’ tool otherwise known as a mouse which means scrolling down the options becomes a mundane process which gets you annoyed at it deeply. Infact – let’s play a game of pros and cons with FM Handheld:

Hot Topic: There All Bloody Communists Apparently…

That’s not how I would describe Throw In really – but Spike did, and has also drawn this article to the attention of TI readers, creating unnecessary controversy – causing them to dissent on the site in hordes, brimming with self confidence and annoyance, and ripping it to shreds just as I had predicted would happen merely hours ago. ‘The Damn Scene’ has already caused ripples of uproar at Throw In, causing riots and calls for protest (basically saying; why write this? and ‘you are sad’) against the site and it’s overtly critically TI article/review. This has me asking myself – could this be the single most important event of mass uproar since the beatings of Rodney King? No. A site disrespected you, get over it.

When did the scene get to the point when people got so touché – g-o-d? Why should a pointless article taking the piss out of another site aggravate such a reaction, I know it hurts to have your site insulted – but Throw In, one of the major players of the scene shouldn’t really be so overly sensitive and send there staff members attacking. Could you not just a) laugh it away but still take some of the points of the article with you or b) realise this person is obviously seems to have a bit of a grudge against the given site but yet you have the last laugh as you have thousands of more hits than them. This all sucks. Yet I bet the writer is smiling, because he has been practically handed hits on a plate, and the infuriation of Throw In might actually make him feel as if he has achieved something. The scene is too controversial for its own good nowadays. As a matter of fact, when did people start taking the piss out of peoples site for no reason; was it Fantastic at BALLS? I’m not going to sound like some preaching aging hippy telling you we should have a ‘community’ and that ‘my love is real, our love is real’ (god bless the Jackson’s) – that’s just plain embarrassing. You made the community the shit; now get yourselves out of it. Dig people, dig.

I’ll leave this little ‘jumble of mixed up words’ online overnight. By morning (hopefully) this will all be over.

Discussion: Should FM have difficulty levels?

Recently I have decided that I should introduce a new theme to this site; discussion posts about Football Manager and the community. This is my debutee and looks a something you may have thought about before.

So, first up is a pondering question – Should FM have difficulty levels? This is a question that has been querying me recently as to whether it should.

I’m An Addict And Other Pointless Drivel

Oh my dear god. Sports Interactive cursed us to forever be shocked with ourselves when they added the gameplay timer and it’s deeply worrying slogans – ‘Football Managers don’t need food’ I’m currently on. What a cruel inclusion that fucking timer was. There is a strange realisation that your life has gone down the pan when you see that you have spent a total of three wasteful days pointlessly filing through a glossy set of glorified spreadsheets. And that just one fricking little game? I tend to think I may have spent well over a week of my precious little life withering away on the span of CM/FM games I have owned, time that could be spent swimming with dolphin and doing other life fulfilling activities. My eyes are opened I’ll tell you that, I mean, some people who’s history with the game dates back donkeys years must of spent, well, a month on these games maybe. And not to mention the time we spend sitting on our half dead backsides exploring the many links of the scene. We are officially hooked, SI’s corporate machine must be smiling now, they have got us into Football Manager. I demand compensation! People have said they wear suits to games, they have FM all nighters – I attack cushions whenever I’m angry at a loss. This is it. Should we view this game time as wasteful? Are we really all that sad…?

48 Hours Later…

So, a wave of enthusiasm has seen this site become full with updates over my first few days here, although things will settle soon enough and I’m still waiting on the wave of visitors to dock into harbour . There is a sliver lining to this news however as a couple of the selected few remaining credible scene stars have jumped on my mini band wagon and given muchy respect to the site, with Rob, the most lavish of all praises citing my ‘I’m Out Of Touch’ (my surprising most popular article) as ‘absolutely superb’ and calling me a ‘a man after [his] own heart’. I can understand this as while looking through old accumulations of FGN main site articles I came across this piece, which was about a mini experiment Rob did which tackled a similar issue – if not in a rather more long winded way. Others have also commented on this site favourably, including smiggs calling it ‘insightful’ and Marsh commented on the design – which I chose for it’s simple let somehow smooth design. As I’ve mentioned before I’m not to into the hierarchy the scene has, think of the little guys and all that, but it is nice to get praise from people who are respected for doing things right.

Although I did receive some criticism, less than I expected (although to be fair I have advertised very minimally) from Pano, who I can tell is not one for either my style of writing or scene articles as he described the site with great profundity as ‘a little bit boring’. I could have done worse, and I fully understand his issues. I’m really masquerading this site as a Football Manager one while really so far it has acted as a place for me to vent frustrations with the scene – which does not appeal to a mass audience. But recently that is what I’ve wanted to write about, so, that’s what I wrote about. Although fear not people who do come here expecting Football Manager worded works arriving on there screen, a piece which I feel will not fail so terribly this time is on the way soon, although, as I said before – no deadlines. Well there’s no article today – just this – so, look around at older pieces or…bugger off I guess.

Fed Up With Being Fed Up

I don’t really write FM articles if I’m honest with you, my 75 readers, (I lie, my 75 views, its shocking) and I’m sure me and my style so to speak, do not appeal to a mass audience. Not everything to do with FM has been done out there, as this article points out, but everything that could be done can easily be done to a better standard than I would do it. I can’t right guides, I can’t even play FM well without cheating sneakily, I was even just writing a ramble about my ‘anti-LLM is cool, Top Teams rule!’ stance and upon reading it through I was horrified. But what I can do is go off on a rampant about some silly and meaningless issue for the Football Manager Community, so, let’s start with a quote:

‘What I am bored of is people saying how boring the scene is, or threads asking if peoples bored of the scene. It’s a common thing on all sites, at some stage we all loose interest. Some more than others, however there’s no need to keep asking as that’s pointless and helps nothing.’ Cleon, Throw In Forums, 9/1/07