As of today I started already 3 master league and wasn’t able to finish one season with any of them!!! it’s incredible. All season stops after several matches (seems random, appearing after 9-10 matches, about in the middle of season).

You play a match and after the first half ends, once you click to start the 2nd half the game crashes and quits on the desktop! (I’m playing the Pc version of course).

It’s really incredible that Konami has released such a bugged game. I’ve tried with 2 different pc with all different components (an Intel with ATI card, an AMD Sempron with Nvidia card). On both configurations, same result: that crash after first half.

If I reload the savegame and try again, nothing – the crash remains on that particular match.

Of course, I have the original game – but I’m quite pissed about this and probably next year won’t buy the game, if they keep releasing it without a proper testing…!!!

EDIT: ok so I found the problem… if you play in another language (at least that was my case, playing in italian language) you won’t be able to play in master league mode! I solved it switching back to english, not a problem for me, but this doesn’t mean that the game was properly tested anyway

So yes, was a very busy year, but very rewarding, also because I finished USM2, and started three more projects at same time. I can’t reveal yet the details but can tell you that one is a RPG, another is a nice “tycoon” game, and the last one is an adventure game with manga drawings that I’m making together with Sakura Games.

Oh was about to forget: Happy New Year!

I still remember when I had the idea of making a sequel of my first shareware game ever, Universal Soccer Manager , expecially because wasn’t available on mac platform. I was strongly encouraged by several people, and I started this long project. It was a tough one, the starting date is a “scary” 11th september 2005, but finally today, 21st december 2006, I can say that it’s over – at least the version 1.0!

Indeed as you might know, I have the bad idea of releasing free lifetime updates of my games, like I did in the past with titles like Magic Stones or Universal Boxing Manager, so even if USM2 is out, is not going to end now. I have a long list of new features/gameplay enhancement that I intend to implement over the course of the whole next year 2007.

I’m very pleased how the game turned out, both graphically (the GUI, the fonts, etc) and the engine. For this I must thank Patrice of Phelios, who helped me a lot during the initial phase of USM2 creation. He had the whole engine ready after just a few months – the rest was all my work, but was very simplified from having such a solid system “behind my neck”.

So… what else to say if not “go and download the game now!!!”

It means that will miss the most basic passes, goalscoring chances (in one match I had Ronaldinho miss 2 penalties… can this be possible?!) and so on. Your defenders also will instantly become slower and weaker than opponent. That is, a player of the height of Maradona could jump and win the ball with heading versus a tall defender like Stam…

Ok ok, some might say “if you always win, where’s the fun??”. Sure that’s true – still when you draw a match where you had 60% ball possession, were leading 2-0 after 1st half, and had 2 penalties (both missed by Ronaldinho as I said above), versus a much weaker team (was playing Brazil – Peru !!!) I don’t know if is still so… fun!

So, talking about USM2 transfer… CPU-controlled team do them. Put players on sale. You can buy players now. Last step, CPU players that buys your players! I’m going to put that in the option “transfer difficulty”.

Will mean how hard it is for your coach to buy/sell players – might seem a secondary aspect but it isn’t. Try to win the game without being able to buy better/younger players!

This brought a new aspect I haven’t thought of – finances… so for now everything is automatic, but I’ve already in mind some interesting additions, like a report of earnings from the various sources of income, tickets, tv-rights, merchandise… but for now better just focus on the 1.0 release, that I want to be before Christmas!

I did a test run for the league – amazing, played 15 league weeks with instant match option, and took me about 1h, making everytime the formation adjustment. Each click takes about 2-3s of calculation time. I’m very proud of it, no more time wasted waiting for the CPU to calculate the match!!

So what’s going on next? after I finish version 1.0, I plan to keep working on it – no pause at all. I’ll listen to player feedback to improve it with new features/additions, first of all the national cups and possibly the international ones. This undoubtly will be my most updated game ever

In any case I’ll let user change the size of database or which leagues to run in the game options. Also for now, as I already announced, no cups will be present in the initial v1.0 release. Of course as soon as v1.0 is on sale, I’ll start working on adding features in subsequent updates, which will be free for existing customers This kind of games (sports managements) are really huge to make, so I guess I’ll never run out of new things to add!

In the meanwhile, take a look at my title screen!

• scoring actions with multiple choices and different results based on your active player skills
• events like penalties, free kicks
• injuries and yellow/red cards
• substitutions
• set your general team strategy: type of attack, counterattack, offside play, type of defensive marking, etc
• change speed of the match
• see in realtime the ratings of players and their fitness value (fatigue) to choose better which one to substitute

So now what’s left for the version 1.0 ? the player transfers and the end of season events – promotion, relegation and such. Also I need to make the possibility for the player to change team during his career. So yes, there’s still quite some work left to do…

And indeed I’m working on it, I swear! yesterday night finally passed another great milestone – played a complete match, everything went fine, player ratings, realistic results and events, etc.

But the “problem” is that today got my copy of PES6 fresh from the oven ! So I MUST play it for a while. I just played for a few hours and those are my first impressions:

• realism: the game got even better! the dribblings feel much more realistic – more varied, not always the same sidestep as previous version, there are more casual rebounds like in real soccer
• goalkeeper finally can lose control of the ball when saving: before either they were saving, or they were putting on corner kick. Now they can even just punch the ball, that will remain dangerously in the penalty area!
• conterattacks! yeah! finally a true counterattack! Was the 89′ minute, my team winning 1-0 and the opponent all pressing forward during a corner kick, I manage to steal the ball and launch a solitary player. I went one on one vs the opponent GK and scored! such situations never happened before (there were always some defenders around!)
• air play – the headers, the contrast were also greatly improved. Even here, the word is “randomness”. Of course having a big tall guy can have you get almost all the passes, but for other cases there’s much more variety of touches and situations.

In one word: this new version rulez, way better than the previous one that was a little disappointing!