⚽️👾 Football Diversions
Football Manager 2024 is totally my jam, but it's also ridiculously complex, and time intensive. It's also been out for over a year and is thus dependent on mods and add-ons to get a more up-to-the-minute experience reflecting current team rosters and transfers. I've fully intended to start playing since the end of summer, but at some point all the setup and downloading I was doing before I began led to complete paralysis. Suddenly I'd lost the motivation to begin playing a season. Compounding things was the impending arrival of FM25 and then the half-year delay of FM25. 2024 was going to be my only option, but I couldn't bring myself to start.
In the meantime, while not playing FM 2024 I have been listening to The FM Show podcast and considering alternatives. They've had a lot of interesting FM-adjacent discussions over the last few months because of the FM25 delay and their January 30 episode featured the developer of a really cool new cozy soccer game called Bang Average Football. BAF is a super fun melding of Sensible Soccer and Stardew Valley. I was immediately smitten and figured my soccer and Stardew-loving daughters would enjoy it as well, particularly since it offers women's teams.
While looking into the purchasing options for BAF1 I realized that BAF's spiritual ancestor, Sensible World of Soccer 97/97, is on sale for $1.49 (normally 5.99) on GOG right now. Apparently, in retro-gaming circles SWOS, is considered the best soccer game of all time. Furthermore, there's a whole community of fans and modders at German fansite sensiblesoccer.de that released SWOS 2020, a modernization that adds a ton of improvements including HD widescreen support, USB controller support, DLC for pitches, sound fx, commentary, and yearly team and player updates. The one catch for me is that it's PC only, but you can get it to run on Mac via Wine.
So yeah, playing FM 2024 just got pushed further down the line.