Let Football Manager 2012 soothe your hungover head

Posted February 19, 2012 by Jamie Donnelly in Opinion.

Games for a Hangover: Did you have one too many last night? Wishing the churning stomach and banging head would just go away? FOOTBALL MANAGER 2012 can’t cure your hangover, but it can certainly make it manageable…

I’ve never understood why a fry-up is considered the greatest hangover cure. Sausages, bacon, beans and fried bread are great if you live directly next to a greasy spoon, but if you don’t, a fry-up signifies pots and pans, cooking and cleaning, and a whole lot of work that your fragile state just isn’t capable of dealing with.

That’s why the far superior hangover food is leftover pizza. You take it out the fridge and you eat it: the work has already been done for you the night before and, even better, by somebody else. As long as you haven’t made the crucial mistake of using a slice as a makeshift pillow during the night, it should be in fine nick and sort out your alcohol-related woes.

The same applies to gaming. When you’re barely able to put one foot in front of the other, the last thing you want is to be mucking about with complicated controls. Your fingers and brain won’t be on the same wavelength, and the ensuing internal argument is sure to result in the wrong button being pressed and confusion erupting.

This is why Football Manager 2012, for all its complex and detailed underpinnings, is the perfect hangover cure: you can basically play the entire game exclusively with the space bar. All the complicated stuff happens behind the scenes, allowing the input required from you to be minimal.

You’ll have to click now and again when you’ve got an injury or suspension, but for the most part you can just that one key and watch the news items and screens flow on by. Not reading this stuff will mean you’ll miss out on the flavour of the game, such as players having tantrums and rival managers taking a pot-shot at you, but the important stuff remains intact.

Be prepared

It does require some prep work in advance of your morning/early afternoon suffering. Seeing as even the most quiet nights out can instantaneously turn into eight pints and a sense that you’re in a suburb of London that your partner doesn’t actually live in at 3 o’clock in the morning (it’s a long story), I’d highly recommend having a game set up ahead of time, ready and waiting to break out in case of an emergency hangover.

Setting up leagues and choosing your initial team is a decision that the hangover-addled brain just isn’t capable of making. Likewise, training regimes, contract negotiations, and sweet-talking the press aren’t activities you want to undertake when your grey matter’s going through the tumble-dryer.

Have your players ready, have your assistant take control of all extraneous activities, and it’d be even better if you’ve got a team that’s on form to load up, as flying high at the top of the league is much more relaxing than battling relegation at the bottom. Hangover or not, this is always the way with Football Manager: once you’re over the initial work, you’ll hit a smooth cruise control that turns the stress of management into a zen-like experience.

It may sound like you’re barely even playing a game, just watching the action flow by, and that’s what’s so perfect about it. You just need to push the action along, watch the games play out, and bask in the glory of well-earned silverware.  It’s truly the leftover pizza of gaming: the rewards are yours to take, and you’ll barely have to lift a finger.

A word of warning/totally serious disclaimer thingy: Football Manager 2012 is not applicable to all hangovers. It’s fine if the cause was a BYOB house party that lasted ‘til 6am, or if your night of busting god-awful shapes on the dancefloor turned into a memory-less mess.

If, however, your hangover is the result of drowning your sorrows because you’ve just watched your team crash out of the FA Cup, Football Manager may do nothing more than bring up the very thing that drove you to drink in the first place, and add a further dark cloud over your already grey outlook. Football Manager will not cure football-related blues; it’ll only make them worse.

Games for a Hangover is BeefJack’s weekendly attempt to get you through the morning after the night before. Click to read more columns.

Tagged as FM2012, Football Manager 2012, Games for a Hangover