I’ve just visited Iceland. It was an enjoyable if rather expensive visit. Yes, I could have visited my local supermarket and that would have been cheaper, but I didn’t and instead headed to the Nordic island in the North Atlantic.
The flight from Manchester to Rejkjavik isn’t long at approximately 2:40 or so. However, I needed something to keep me entertained during the flight. Whilst waiting at in the departure lounge of Terminal 1 at Manchester Airport, I decided to fire up my Chromebook and start a new career on our Single Player game, Soccer Manager 2016.
To start a new career on the Single Player game, you need access to the Internet. Needless to say that I made good use of the free Wi-Fi in the airport lounge whilst I was waiting to board my flight to Rejkjavik.
I decided to take control of my home town team, Preston, who have just been promoted to the second tier of English football. Even though I had grand ideas about taking them to the promised land, I think that is just a pipe-dream at the moment because I’m managing in one of the most competitive leagues around.
Whenever I start a new game in the Single Player, one of the first things that I do is give my squad a good once over and decide who is part of my plans for the up-coming season and who needs to move to pastures new. Despite being in control of my local club, I haven’t visited Deepdale since August 2013 and apart from glancing at their results each week, I’ll hold my hands up and admit I know nothing about their current squad.
Therefore it took slightly longer than I wanted and it didn’t help when my wife kept distracting me asking about what itinerary I had planned for the next few days! She should know by now that I’m a very organised individual and have everything planned out with military precision. So I felt like telling her to leave me in peace so that I could crack on with my Soccer Manger 2016 career.
The game caught the attention of my 9 year-old daughter whilst playing my first friendly of the season against Accrington. She heard the noise of the crowd from the 2D matchday and watched the game unfold with me. I told her she could be my Assistant Manager and she was happy with that. However, her knowledge of Preston was no better than mine and she kept asking who all of the players were and why couldn’t we just go and sign [insert name of famous player] she’d seen on TV.
Yes, I could easily buy a nice juicy cash injection for my club and build a squad in my image, but I thought it’d just be easier to start a new career managing a team she’d heard of and players that were familiar to her. So my stint in charge of my home town team was over and a new one started managing Barcelona.
At this point I will add that she became the manager and I was merely her assistant giving pointers. What I found amazing was watching her navigate round the game and my view is if a 9-year-old can manage that, then most people should be able to.
Before we knew it we had to board our plane, so we quickly saved our game and boarded our flight to Rejkjavik. The Chromebook ended up in our hand luggage in the over head compartment much to my daughters disappointment. However, I didn’t turn off my Sony Xperia mobile phone as I thought it would be good for her to continue playing the game as it would keep her occupied during the flight.
How was this possible? Due to our x-platform technology, Soccer Manager 2016 is available to play on any device and you only need the one account. So our Single Player career was saved on my Chromebook and we simply loaded our save game on my Sony Xperia and continued from where we left off using the free Android app.
I think this is fantastic as there aren’t many games out there with x-platform technology, but this was lost on my daughter who continued to play oblivious to this fact.
Why don’t you start a career on Soccer Manager 2016 as you can play your save game on any device?
The majority of people know that you have to turn electrical equipment off during take off / landing whilst on a plane and during the flight mobile phones need to be switched off or in aeroplane mode. Therefore my wife was surprised when she saw our daughter playing Soccer Manager 2016 and duly asked how this was possible?
“Ah, it’s due to the offline mode that the game has.” I replied. This seemed to go over her head so I explained further. “You just play the game as normal. It saves to your device. Once you connect back to the Internet, your game is then saved in the cloud.” Now she understood what I meant by offline mode as she’d heard of “cloud technology”.
So we had a nice quiet flight to Rejkjavik that went quite fast due to my daughter being preoccupied with trying to win the league with Barcelona. During that time she was playing game after game due to liking the 2D matchday experience and watching players that she’d heard of and seen on TV. That was good enough for me!
For the duration of our holiday she continued her career on the Single Player game, making use of our x-platform technology and offline mode, seamlessly switching from Chromebook at the hotel to my my Sony Xperia whilst travelling across the country by coach. This technology is lost on her, but it’s something that I appreciate as i’m sure most of you do.
Now that we’re back in the UK, i’m hoping she’ll continue to play the game from time to time and develop into a Soccer Manager addict like myself.
About the author – Steven Gore
Steven is one of the co-founders of Soccer Manager and has been playing SM Worlds since August 2005. He can be found in Gold Championship 7 (Game World ID 3065) managing Castilla if you’d like to join him.
