MKD - Promotion to npower Championship

 Season 1 is done, and our MKD won not only a promotion but also the title. Here are some of the stats for this season. First the table and fixtures

We had quite an exciting team as well and here are some interesting stats from our players. Notably, Daniel Power was the league's top scorer with a wooping 37 goals, followed by Francois Zoko (32, Carlisle United) and Iain Hume (28, Preston). Preston actually had a really impressive season in my 2011-2012 season, they not only did well in L1 but they managed to get to the final of the FA Cup after beating Newcastle on the semi final and Wigam in the Sixth round. They lost the final to Manchester City 3x0, but boy they showed some heart there.

Other interesting stats... Daniel Power had the best rating of the L1 with 7.51, followed by Preston's Iain Hume (7.48) and MKD's Mauricio Risso (7.35). In terms of assists Stephen Quinn took 1st (19, Sheffield United), followed by Antonio Tomas (18, MKD) and Dale Stephens (15, Charlton). MOM winner was Francois Zoko (14, Carlisle), Iain Hume (11, Preston) and Daniel Powell / Shefki Kuqi / Nathan Eccleston (8, MKD / Oldham / Brentford)

Milton Keynes Dons - new FM12 carreer

All the talk about FM13 has made me very eager to play FM again. I thought I'd be able to wait for FM13, but turns out I couldn't, so I started a new game managing Milton Keynes Dons from the English Npower League 1. I decided to go with MKD for a couple of reasons:

1. They had a reasonably sized stadium
2. They were not as low league as my previous games
3. They were located in a more prosperous region than some of the other teams I was considering

I will have to come clean to start with... In this game I have cheated a little. By that I mean that I edited so that MKD has a sugar daddy and so that I wiped all the debt off of the team before I joined. Problem? This will just make my financial situation a bit better in this game, which may help me stay motivated and play more than a couple of seasons. Well let's see how it works out.

Also I'm not going to updated the blog on this game as much just to see if I can get further by just playing through. In the beginning I might just do a few reports every season to mention how things are going, however not until I have a pretty solid thing going on, I will post more details on this career.

Review: Faster than light

Just picked up a nice little indy game this week called Faster than light (FTL), which is available on steam for less than $10. The game is a space dungeon crawler kind of thing. You start off with only one option for a ship, and 3 humans as crew. From there you are put in a sector where you have to keep jumping to other sectors as you are being chased by some bad guys. As you move along you encounter different things, such as pirates that want to kill you, ships in distress and other randomized type things. You are often given options on what you want to do next, so there is a level of RPG in it that way as well as the fact that you "level up" and improve your ship as you go.

Similarly to other roguelikes (ie. Dwarf Fortress), it is almost always innevitable that you will die. At least for me so far, the game is about seeing how far I can get before I get myself into a situation I have no chance of succeeding in. The reason I like it so much is the amount of strategy involved with the combat. It reminds me a bit of X3 but obviously it doesn't have the same quality of graphics as you can see from my pic, but managing crew, weapons and so forth are quite fun and it does get quite intense. For that I give this little gem a B+, for it's originality as well as for being such a fun and well paced game.

FM12: Promotion from Blue Square Bet Premier (BSP)

Another season over, and a good one at that. After a rough patch near the end of the regular season, we managed to stay in 5th, enough to get us to the playoffs. Once we got there we eliminated Luton as I mentioned on the previous post, which led us to the final againstal Forest Green at Old Trafford.

The game wasn't as exciting as the Luton one, but we still managed to provide the fans with a bit of a spectacle, they were definitely pleased. We started the game playing a bit defensively, but managed a nice goal in the first 5 minutes from a counter attack. Aaron Brown was the scorer. Tiago Sala from Forest Green managed a comeback at 13min from a header. At 33min we scored again, with Darwin Perez and then once again just before half-time. The second half wasn't as eventful, but the opposition did manage to score a second goal with Erik Opsahl at 83min. That wasn't enough however to get them into the game again.

Overall, I'd say this was a good season. We even managed to get our finances back to a reasonable place. We finished it with 104,726 pounds on the green, which will definitely help next season when we will need to step up the quality of our game.

FM12: good playoff start in 2013

Well, well, well... The end of this season didn't go as smoothly as I predicted. For some reason we ended up losing a lot of easy games towards the last few fixtures, but we still managed 5th place, which was just enough to make it to the playoffs. Unfortunately, that led us to the top team, Luton, which has been a bit of a pain to deal with before, was our first challenged for the second promotion spot. Last season, if you remember, they were the ones that eliminated us.

Well this season was different. After a cagy first game draw 2x2, we went to play away with Luton for the final. We changed to a 4-5-1 for this game and after 90 minutes we were still tied 1x1. I thought we would have to hold and prey for a penalty shoot-out. Hatch had other plans, and he scored a very opportunistic goal in the first period of OT, which put us in a very comfortable position. We just had to hold on to the score after that point. It was a really great game, and we are now off to the final.

FM12: Playing Arsenal at home

This season has been alright for Darlington, however, I thought we would be doing a little bit better than we are. We had a shaky start but thinks got better as we played more games. On the league we are currently in 4th place, which is good for our goal of getting promoted this season. We just need to keep it up for a few more months. Aside from that we unfortunately ended up losing to Grimsby 0x2 on the 2nd round of the FA Trophy, which apparently pissed off the board. However, to make up for that we had some amazing results in the FA cup. We were not supposed to get past Scunthorpe in the 3rd round of the competition, but we ended up tying the first game and winning our home game. We did not expect this great of a result. This led us to a 4th round game against Arsenal, which was crazy. We had no illusions about getting kicked out of the competition by them, however such a big club brough a full house to our game, which luckily was at home. We had 25033 people watching our game, not even counting TV viewers. This brought us a total of 535608 pounds for just one game, which is such an amazing boost for our finances, we even managed to come out of the red. Currently we have 220K in balance, which might even be enough to keep us afloat to the end of the season. If we do well, we might even be able to spend some more money on salaries next season. What a great thing this Arsenal game was.

FM12: no you can't work in this country!

 After a very solid pre-season campaign, for some reason we didn't actually have a good start. On the positive side, at least our attendance has been improving from last season though. We have also made quite a few changes to the roster, with the addition of some great new loans as well as a few contracted players. Of which I would highlight Franco Miranda (WL/ML), who is quite well rounded and should bring something positive to the team. Loris Karius (GK), who was cut from Manchester City, and I had to snatch him. He's a young goalie with a lot of promise, I think he could easily become our new starting goalie in time. I didn't know who else to show here since I actually like most of our new players, so I picked the Brazillian forward with a lot of good physical attributes Edicarlos (ST).

I also learned that I can't just hire a lot of Brazillians if they don't have appropriate work permit, which made it so I couldn't pick up about half of the players I tried out during pre-season. The lesson there, make sure players are allowed to play for you before you invest yourself emotionally to them.