Friday 25 May 2007
While Football Manager Live has revealed its inevitably stratospheric stake in the online football management world, the newly announced Football SuperStars MMO for PC is set to do the same for individual football players. Instead of setting up and managing a team, this game sees you taking on the life of an aspiring player.
It's an extremely ambitious idea that sees you meeting up with other players online to take part in 3, 5, 7 and 11-a-side matches - and yes, if you’re playing left back with a pair of greedy strikers, it's possible you'll only touch the ball once every 15 minutes. It's kind of the Holy Grail of football games, as close to real-life positional play as you can get, the opposite of PES and FIFA's 'control the entire team' approach.
Borrowing in part from Madden NFL's Superstar mode, players also live the life of a footballer on and off the pitch in what's described as a 'soccer-styled virtual world' and it'll be up to you to join the best clubs and manage your career, wary of the ever-present media eye, which can both a negative and positive effect on your prospects.
It all sounds incredibly promising - but will thrive or die depending on the quality of the game of football it centers on (who remembers the novel, but ultimately flawed Libero Grande?). The dream of course, would be a modified FIFA or PES engine, but that isn't going to happen.
Rik Alexander, CEO of Monumental Games, the developer behind the project (out next year) sells it like this, "Football already has great communities and fan bases and we're hoping to capture that passion and bring it together in a virtual world where players can literally live, breathe and eat football." Hmm, tasty.
For more info on this exciting projectsign up at the Football Superstars web site.
