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90 minutes (plus extra time and penalties), the SI way


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FM's match engine is a landmark achievement in the history of sports games. Hardly ever before has there been a sports game that came as close to the real thing. When I first stumbled upon the game, it was FM's match engine that hit me real hard and knocked me flat out of the boat. It was mind-blowing. It was a football nerd's dream coming true, warts and all. ;)

So, small (and not so small) quirks aside - even SI's displayal of The Real Thing™ doesn't include the full 90 minutes of the game. Never bothered to look at the clock while playing, I'm still wondering how many minutes of real-time football the game simulates, on normal speed settings, that is. And if this number has improved over past versions. I know that every once in a while an important match day keeps me occupied for about an hour, but exact figures would be kind of interesting.

A bloody nerdish question? You bet! This is a nerd's game, honest. :D

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Fanboy :p

As far as I'm aware the full 90 minutes are simulated, but it doesn't take that long because the game makes little jumps when players are injured or when the ball is out of play, i.e. if there is a throw-in, corner, penalty or free-kick you will se the game speeding up to the taking of it just like in the highlights mode. In the end it usually takes 60 minutes to watch the whole game in my impression.

hth :)

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I'm not hardcore enough to watch full match mode in the slowest mode - my Bremen games tend to take ~20 minutes to watch, but the only "clock skips" I see are when corners or freekicks or whatever take place. Whether slowest mode is a realtime clock or not I have no idea.

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I'm not hardcore enough to watch full match mode in the slowest mode - my Bremen games tend to take ~20 minutes to watch, but the only "clock skips" I see are when corners or freekicks or whatever take place. Whether slowest mode is a realtime clock or not I have no idea.

The slowest setting is hardly the kind of thing that approaches the real-time speed of a match. It's more akin to Football:Bullet Time. I'd estimate the right setting for this is the medium setting, and at that speed I'm not so sure if the in-game seconds tick down in real-time at all.

I remember somebody of SI stating that they haven't quite reached a 90 minutes real-time simulation yet, but I could be wrong. Now that I'm thinking about it, all it would take is to just forget about the jumps the engine makes, set the game to a speed that matches the real speed of actions, and take a look at how fast the in-game seconds (minutes) are passing during periods that don't involve any jumps. Whether they're passing real-time or faster than that. There is a 90 minutes clock at work, in-game, but that's obvious. The question is to what extent it compresses time.

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Ah, yes, I take your point. I watch Bremen with the game speed at ~75% of the bar which is probably slightly faster than real time so I would guess that there is at least a factor of 2 speedup for a full match on medium setting as compared to a real match.

It's not something that is at all as important as in a Le Mans 24 Hr motor racing game I have (an old one) though in which time speedup is really annoying because the lap times are all wrong and you end up doing loads more laps in the same real time as you should be doing!

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It's not something that is at all as important as in a Le Mans 24 Hr motor racing game I have (an old one) though in which time speedup is really annoying because the lap times are all wrong and you end up doing loads more laps in the same real time as you should be doing!

Now that sounds pretty annoying! :D I agree, it's not that important to know. Just kind of....... interesting. I could swear I saw one official assessment being tossed around on these mere boards, but maybe it's all in my head.

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I watch all important matches in full detail. Not sure how long exactly it takes, since i tweak a lot of tactics during play and pause to look at stats etc sometimes. But usually watching the full match on normal speed will take about 30-45 minutes. I've had some games last over an hour but their usually back and forth games in which I'm constantly having to pause as the AI swaps between a 4-2-4 and 4-4-2.

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