英文原文:
Firstly, thanks to hmv.com for giving us (Sports Interactive) the opportunity to blog on their website. It's going to help us to get closer to you, the people who play our games, which is a great thing for us.
To introduce myself, my name is Miles Jacobson, and I'm studio director at Sports Interactive, and we make Football Manager. But then you can read all about us on the other parts of this site anyway, and see an interview with me too to see what I look and sound like, hopefully without your computer screen cracking.
So, the blogs. What are they all about then?
Well, if you didn't know, Football Manager 2009 (PC & Mac) and Football ManagerTM Handheld 2009 (PSP) are both coming out in the UK on November 14th. We announced a few of the key new features for both games over at our youtube channel (www.youtube.co.uk/sigames) a few weeks back, and have been announcing some other new features via the Football Manager Podcast (available for free from iTunes) but still have some other things to announce, so we'll be doing some of that via these blogs.
We'll also be talking a bit about what it's like at this stage of the games development cycle, although we're starting a little bit late for the full insight into that, as we are now nearly at the end so as to be able to release on time, but I'll also talk you through the process that we have to go through to get from finishing the game, to getting it out into the shops throughout the time we're blogging too.
Then there'll also be some blogs coming from all over the world, as I go off on a PR tour. I'm told this year will be less hectic than some (my record is 21 press trips, in 18 countries, in 24 days!) as the youtube video helped in that respect, but I could still be surprised by the amount of trips, and you'll get to share some of the pain with me by listening to me complaining about the standard of pillows in hotels and the like. Travelling sounds glamourous, but it really isn't. But that's for another day anyway.
There'll also be some blogs coming from some of the other guys at SI to look more indepth at some of the new features in the game this year, which will likely come the week before and the week after the demo is released. Although we don't have a firm date for the demo yet, it's normally a couple of weeks before release, so not that long to wait now.
And once we get the greenlight to go into manufacture from Sony for our PSP title, there'll be a PSP special blog, giving a full run down of all the new features in Football Manager Handheld 2009. Oh, I should say that FMH2009 is already finished from our point of view. That code then goes through an approval process at Sony which is shrouded in secrecy, so I can't say too much about it, but they get it for a few weeks to test it all works OK before letting us make the master PSP disc into lots of baby UMD discs.
So that's what we'll be blogging about, which should keep us busy. The plan is to continue blogging every few days until the game is out, then in true blogging style, do them whenever we have something we want to say.
And today, there will be not one, not two, but three blogs, just to get the ball rolling. This is the first, in a couple of hours, there'll be another, which will be a full round up of all the features we've announced so far via the youtube vid and the podcasts, and then a third later about what we're currently up to on the dev cycle.
Cheers
Miles |