Football Manager 2009's match engine has seen more testing than ever before having been extensively beta tested in Football Manager Live for the past year. The famous Football Manager match engine can now be viewed in full 3D with motion captured animations for the players. Sports Interactive has been working on the 3D match engine for nearly 3 years with the support of SEGA Japan's Virtua Striker team who provided the motion capture data and some of the animations. You can now watch your matches in 3D from multiple camera angles and re-watch any part of the match by fast forwarding an d rewinding the action using a new match time bar that flags the key moments in the game. The old 2D view of the match engine is still there, especially for those people whose computers aren't powerful enough to take advantage of the 3D views. As a result of usability testing on Football Manager 2008, this year sees widescreen support for the game for the first time, as well as lots of tweaks to the user interface for easier navigation. Football Manager 2009 is fully updated for the new 2008/09 football season with all the latest league, club and player data, featuring over 5,000 playable clubs from over 50 countries, and around 350,000 players and staff from around the world, drawn fresh from the famous Sports Interactive database. Sports Interactive have worked hard to reflect the greater impact the media has been having in recent years on the world of football, in the in-game dealings with the press. The game now features more news stories, more detail and greater media interaction than ever before, creating an even more realistic simulation of the football world.
