FM 2006 Revisited

In the World Cup spirit, I finally seriously loaded and updated Football Manage 2006 while I wait for Out of the Park Baseball 2006’s next patch. I forgot how much a pain it is to keep a game’s CD-ROM in the disk drive in order to play it. Since most of my gaming time is split between World of Warcraft and OOTP 6.5, FM 2006 is the only one bugging me to insert the CD every time I open the game.

I’m a converted MLS fan now that Houston has a team. Growing up a New York Giants fan means you can never cheer for anything from Dallas, so an even passing interest in FC Dallas was out of the question. The Dynamo solved my problem and the World Cup made me finally get serious about it.

Finding updated MLS rosters is a Google nightmare. I could find only two that included the new teams (Houston and the renamed New York). One had some weird lower division system that the creator decided to include in the database. The other I found at Sport Sims Heaven and I used it, even though it didn’t include the team logos and kits.

Luckily, my search uncovered a nifty site called sourtitoutsi and it should be in every text gamer’s bookmark section. It not only has all sorts of great stuff to download, but it contains strategy guides and tutorials for most of Sports Interactive’s games. There’s even an OOTPB 2006 newbie guide posted.

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I downloaded the complete logo set and new MLS kits from sourtitoutsi. Updating the database was pretty easy. Not so with the logos. Eventually I just deleted the installed files and extracted the new pictures to get the team pictures to appear. But it sure makes the game seem more alive with the new logos and uniforms.

I’ll continue to update my progress as things get going…