Football Manager; the game that makes it so easy to forget that coursework or dissertation or article you have to finish that you begin to wonder why you ever pledged to take Newport County to the Champions League in the first place. Not evening hiding the icon from your desktop can save you from a void like this. Like The Sims, Football Manager's biggest strength as a game is in its simplicity. Players are essentially just studying a database and managing their assets to beat the odds of probability in each given scenario. The packaging of the experience is where the danger lies though; these games give players who spend their weeknights and weekends criticising the failings of real-life football managers the chance to feel like they are actually in that hotseat. While it can be fun to take on the responsibility of managing an already lethal squad of Premier League players, Football Manager becomes most rewarding for players who opt to start at the bottom and build their way to ultimate glory. Football Manager is a game so important and engrossing that it has genuinely altered the way its players interact with real-life football. Watching a player from a team's youth squad be introduced into a game as a substitute while you're in a pub surrounded by students, will without fail illicit at least one assertion that a person "signed him on football manager two years ago" when they took a Conference level team to the FA Cup final. It will also probably be accompanied by an explanation that said player "was always a little bit injury-prone on Football Manager" as if somehow the two are linked. So there they are; ten games that have been responsible for countless missed deadlines, numerous broken relationships and an infinite number of weeks spent with just sweat pants and a console. What others would you add to this list that have taken irreplaceable chunks of your own life? Let us know in the comments!
Gareth is 28 years old and lives in Cardiff. Interests include film, TV and an unhealthy amount of Spider-Man comics and Killers songs. Expect constant references to the latter two at all times.
Follow on twitter @GJCartwright.
