The same solid handheld principles apply to the iOS version, with the ability to 'manage' squad selection and tactics on a fairly superficial level if you wish and up to four active nations running at once (from a choice of 12). It is especially good for passing time on long journeys as it is based on strategy rather than button bashing so games can be left to run at certain times without interference. The match engine reverts back to Championship Manager of a few years ago with text updates during the match as opposed to the 2D view but sadly there are no crowd noises and therefore no atmosphere whatsoever.

No longer was it about simply managing the tactics and transfers of your fantasy team, but handling egos and fretting about media relations and dozens of other micro tasks that ultimately distract you from the things that you enjoyed most. SI have over 80 employees and I would say at least 60 of them are for FM and the other 20 are FMH (though 18 would be QA as only 2 code). net is owned by Gamer Network Limited, a ReedPop company and subsidiary of Reed Exhibitions Limited. For more than five years, the PSP version has provided the closest approximation of the stripped-down FM experience that many of us naturally gravitate towards, and this year's edition continues to stick doggedly to those sensibilities. A small reduction in the number of stats, the removal of superfluous graphics like club badges, and the super-sharp quality of the widescreen PSP display makes it possible to still cram in tons of detailed information with very little in the way of compromise.

I'm the biggest fan of football manager on the PC, I can easily spend hours and hours at a time on it. Happily, there's never any sense of impending failure if you don't bother with expanding your stadium or improving your training facilities, and the game never nags you into doing anything you're not bothered about. So, imagine our delight (and slightly guilty fear) when we got to feast our eyes on Sports Interactive's forthcoming Football Manager Handheld, due for release on the PSP on April 13th.

They have already admitted they could do very little with the PSP as the game was hitting the limits a few years ago. There is no way you can become the most sucessful manager if you're limited to 4-4-2, 3-4-3 and so on. In 2004, after splitting from long-time publishers Eidos, London based developers Sports Interactive bought the rights to the Football Manager name and the series was re-awakened for the PC age. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).As for multiplayer, that's off the menu, despite the obvious potential of the PSP's wireless capabilities. btw just to clarify a few things - the main issues with adding new features to the PSP version of the game involved processing power (the PSP is heavily biased towards graphical performance not data processing) and the save game size (the PSP has a (relatively) small maximum save game allowed whereas other mobile devices don't cap such things - we do what we can to work around this using compression but it obviously limits what we can do in some ways). If all you want to do is focus on the team selection, in-game tactics and an occasional dip into the transfer market, then it's all here, and couldn't really be any more intuitive. Other reviews of this game bemoan the fact that it's a cut down of the PC version - no 2d game engine etc.

The game also includes a full career mode, giving players the chance to take their team all the way to the top. The 'full fat' version continues to dominate the scene on PC and Mac and it's the least shocking revelation of the year to learn that the 2012 version is officially quite good.There are WAY too few stats for each player (about half as many as on the PC), so you have the ridiculous situation of all players looking pretty much identical to one another. Winning wasn't too hard so I used to challenge myself by playing with League 2 teams and take them to the Premier League (Omar Koroma ftw), but I'm currently struggling to win against lowly opposition with Liverpool. On the bright side, football manager for ps vita looks great will definitely pick it up for my vita . Well, evidently FM Handheld was never going to be a direct port, and so the game has been streamlined to make sure the whole experience is as slick as possible.

Football Manager is a series of football management computer games that was started in 1982 by Kevin Toms. Trust me a lot of love and care is put into the handheld games - however we have a very small team (was 2 programmers - up to 3 this year) working across a number of platforms in comparison to the PC/Mac team which numbers vastly larger (for comparison purposes there are more than 2 times the number of people working on the 'match' area of the PC code than on the entire handheld team).Now I don't know you or your history in the games industry or any business in general really but it seems like it is funded on the wrong premises. Continuing improvements to the 3D match engine also help drag it kicking and screaming into the present, although it's still a long way short of FIFA Manager in that regard. That one-more-fixture, one-more-transfer feeling creeps into the lives of all but the most disciplined players, and this uncontrollable, bona-fide addiction is responsible for more than the odd divorce and relationship headache along the way.