[SackAttack]

I figured since I've got my review copy and I never get a chance to start one of these, why not?

If I'm repeating anything that's already been covered in the demo thread, I apologize, but as this is my first exposure to FM 2007 (I didn't download the demo, because my wireless connection frankly sucks for these things), I'm just going to comment on what stands out to me.

If it feels fairly stream of consciousness, that's because I'm commenting as I notice stuff.

I like the "pick three nations" wizard at startup, especially since when you shift to 'advanced options,' it seems to default to the most common 'lowest level' leagues. League Two in England, for example, leaving out the Conferences.

Makes it easy to just go, like, "England, France, Italy" and you're ready to go.

That's optional, so it can be turned off for folks who prefer the classic setup.

There's a 'recommended setup' option. When I click that, suddenly I've got England, Italy, Mexico, Spain and the USA as playable leagues. I wonder if that's just the minimum SI have set for 'full immersion,' or if that has to do with my system specs and what it can run without impacting system performance.

I'm going to give it a shot with that recommended setup and see how smoothly things run. I can always start a new game and dial it back to my usual "England plus one or two others" if I have problems.

Once you all start to get the game, I'd be interested to see a few of you choose that option and let me know what crops up.

In the advanced options, adding players from additional nations isn't terribly intuitive - my first thought was that selecting the pop-up menu and choosing a nation would select only that nation, and if I did that again, it would replace the nation I'd chosen. I do like that it adds instead of replaces, but I don't know that I would've expected it to do that right off.

Also, it's a little strange that I'm given the choice between UK English and US English, and the game is defaulting to US English...but all of the other measurement options are UK defaults - Celsius, centimetres, blah blah. Nothing major, just disconcerting.

Hey, neat - customizable keyboard shortcuts. That could be cool.

Starting my league now, so I'll cut off my pre-game blatherings here and reply with more pertinent thoughts.