Incredible November Xbox Game Pass addition makes all other games obsolete

Xbox game pass regularly receives an influx of new, high-quality games. In some cases, it’s a bit like that Christmas where I received a bag full of pirated PlayStation games. The amount of goodness in there was almost too much for my childish brain. I was going from game to game faster than I could consume Coke (which was pretty fast), desperate to try them all. Then I decided on Brian Lara Cricket and I was hooked. I played it for months. Soccer manager 2023 Y Console Football Manager 2023 they are the Game Pass equivalent of my pirated copy of Brian Lara Cricket on PlayStation. The other games might as well not exist.

I have a long and rich history with Football Manager and Championship Manager before it… and Premier Manager before that: Premier Manager, a game I played when I was so young I was dumb enough to erase the data on the floppy disks. it came. Fortunately, my mom was able to convince the store that they had provided them in white. Thanks Mom!

Championship Manager was really my gateway to the dark world (often playing at night and not turning on the light) of soccer management sims. It was the precursor to Football Manager, and I first played it at a family friend’s house. My parents were there doing what parents do (buffets, talking), so my brother and I were upstairs on the computer. Time flew by as we played with formations and tried to sign players that Tottenham could never afford.

Shortly after this we bought Championship Manager for our home PC and that was it. My life changed forever. I would spend hundreds (maybe thousands?) of hours trying to get some trophies for my beloved Spurs. Inevitably, he would end up leaving Spurs to try his luck elsewhere, but it was never the same and always resulted in regret. Life imitates art, and all that.

I even ventured into the world of the ill-fated Football Manager Live, the online version of the game that was only played against real people with a completely made-up database of players and teams. What a huge moment this was, and a great community as well, built around admiration for the best managers and certain star players on each server. Absolutely wonderful, but he never reached the heights he deserved and sadly petered out the same way Poch did at Spurs.

Football Manager 2023 is the latest version of what is undoubtedly one of the most immersive games ever made. It’s absolutely amazing if you like soccer and have the time to spend hours managing a virtual team. The fact that you can only play the full PC version or the heavily optimized console version as part of your Game Pass subscription is pretty outrageous. It’s a shame the other games don’t get much attention.

My most memorable Football Manager moment? Probably sitting on the sofa at my mother-in-law’s house on Christmas Eve, with the laptop on, Spurs in the Champions League final. I rediscovered my love for the game thanks to an inspired decision to play 30 minutes a day during my lunch hour, so that Christmas I was fully invested in the team. I hope this happens to other FM players, but at various points in my time with the game I would be so “in” the world that I would mix the events of the game with those of real life. So I would be really baffled that Spurs weren’t the best in the league and didn’t have Messi.

Essentially, it’s easy to get sucked into the world of Football Manager, and so it was that cold winter night. The room melted as the match progressed.

They were leading, 1-1 when the game went into stoppage time and extra time seemed all but guaranteed. Then, horror of horrors, Barcelona scored.

“Damn shit!” I yelled. “Dammit, for God’s sake!” I added as a pursuer: “PULDER!”

My mother-in-law’s neck snapped back as she backed away from Call the Midwife, panic on her face. “Are you okay Tom?” she asked.

“Yes, all good. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Don’t bother. Neymar just scored in the 92nd minute. That’s all.”

“Oh,” she said.

Christmas felt a little different after that.