FM 2011 Demo: Strawberry VS Vanilla

I started a topic on the official SI forums, where I asked people which edition of the demo they normally download and why. I got some interesting replies there, so I thought I'd blog about this.

While waiting for Football Manager 2011 Demo, there is plenty of nonsense talk, and well this is no exception, heh. If you're like me, you'll be surprised that Vanilla is actually winning in the end (?)...

What is the Football Manager Demo?

I'll start with the facts:

• Every year the demo is available in 2 flavors; strawberry is the full package and complete experience, while vanilla is the light version that exists as an alternative for reduced size download.
• With the demo you can play half a season of gameplay, and the saved games from the demo will be compatible with the full release of the game.

How Vanilla is different from the Strawberry?

Alright, now what are the differences between the 2 flavors?

• Strawberry (roughly 1GB)
  * Full Assets: including player pictures, club logos, competition logos, etc for where we have the license. Full pitch textures, stadiums and sounds.
  * In-game language: English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Czech, Polish
  * Quickstarts: England, Scotland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Argentina, Chile
• Vanilla (roughly 300MB)
  * Reduced Assets: including no player pictures, club logos, competition logos, sounds, etc
  * In-game language: English language only
  * Quickstarts: England, Scotland

At first I thought that most people would only go for the strawberry edition, because it's the full experience. All those years I've been getting that edition anyway. But then, I got some replies that proved me wrong, and suggested that vanilla edition is still somewhat popular for various reasons.

Strawberry VS Vanilla

Let's see a summary of the points raised as to which flavor you should consider downloading.

Strawberry Points:

• Full assets, which means all pictures, logos, stadiums and sounds that will be on the retail
• More in-game languages, while vanilla only has English
• More quickstarts, while vanilla only has the UK ones

Vanilla Points:

• You're on a slow internet connection and it's 3x times faster to download (e.g. 56k modem, holy crap I can't believe people use that nowadays)
• Most people junk their saves played on the demo, and start new ones on the retail version
• You only want to play in England to start with, so Vanilla fits that bill
• You just want to see what the new features are
• All the graphics on the full game would be replaced by Megapack variants and any game you start on the Retail release would have a lot more leagues and a custom database selected, so no point in continuing a game from the demo
• Your laptop only has 30GB hard disk space, so you want the smallest version

Er, that was awkward... Vanilla wins lol
If you can think of any additional points, please comment.

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Wondering when the demo is coming out? You might want to read our prediction then.
Football Manager 2011 Demo Release Date