a brief history of footy games

The Amiga Years

My God! Graphics! Sound! etc!

Premier Manager 2… the first game I played on the Amiga. I've got to say it blew me away. Two days before I'd been playing Triple Champions on me Speccy, then…… BOOM! Sound effects!! Commentary!! Colour!! I thought this game was the absolute dogs bollocks for a while. There were many many good points, not least on the Secretary's sweater, right kids? BUT I got bored with it eventually. Who wants to mess about with billboard advertisements? And, there didn't seem to be any genuine sense of players being in "good" or "bad" form. Unlike in real life where you can buy a player you THINK is gonna be good who then turns out to be crap, in PM2 you basically played the guy with the best stats all the time. Which kind of destroys a bit of the fantasy. Oh, and again, way way too hard to get out of the Conference!

Championship Manager 94… this is, indeed, the Holy Grail of Football Management games. It took on PM2 in a head to head battle, chewed it up and spat it out into the gutter. Text based with lots of juicy and realistic stats it was SO involving. And what's more, on a good day you could play a whole season within 2 hours! I still think that this is the best game of its genre ever produced and it’s a damn shame that CM2 had to mess it about so much. I would still play this game now if I could get a copy with up to date players and stats. As it is it looks kinda dated. But it remains the BEST.

Ultimate Soccer Manager… the game always destined to be #3 in the triumvirate at the top of the management tree, USM took elements from PM2, Tactical Manager, and CM94 to forge a …… well, its nice looking certainly, but - again- too much time wasted fixing the price of hotdogs. Also annoying "amusing" newspaper headlines. And player stats that owed little to reality. AND TOO FUCKING TOUGH TO GET OUT OF THE CONFERENCE!! One good thing was that you could offer "bungs" and bet against your own team if you wanted to. But in truth you never really bothered. Oh, and the fonts used were bloody awful. But its okay … really.

Tactical Manager… oh dear oh dear. When you find out that a management game only features two divisions and that promotion/relegation between the two is an "option" you know you are in trouble. I didn't play many seasons of this one, but what I remember is that I always seemed to be way on top of the league at Christmas, unbeaten since September, then I would lose 20 games in a row and end up 18^th. I swear this happened to me 3 seasons in a row. Apparently Tactical Manager 2 was even worse. Surprisingly, I never tried it.

On the Ball:World Cup Edition… a German game that sometimes lurched back into it's mother tongue. I never played the original On The Ball, but this thing was so full of bugs I nearly called in Rentokill. Take your team to the World Cup Finals eh? Listen, it wasn’t a BAD game per se, but ….. well, lets put it this way: it tried to be funny. And it was written by Germans. Get the picture? Plus no real players were in it unless you spent about 8 hours editing all the names. Good points? You could get pissed. Oh, and you could take Carlton Palmer to the World Cup, make him think the team was gonna be built around him, then send him back to England before the first match. Hehehe…..

Club Football-The Manager… I looked for this for AGES after reading a cracking review. Bastards. I even shelled out extra for the AGA version. And….hmmmm. Its main selling point was the detailed tactical designer, which was good, and the ability to change tactics on the fly during the match itself. Which would have been fine if not for the match sequence itself, which had two speeds: slow (which meant a 90 minute match lasted ….. well, about 90 minutes actually) or fast (which meant that the whole thing would be over & done with inside 10 seconds). Oh and it crashed at the end of the first season. Always. Bit of a throwback to the Spectrum then. And I seem to recall it was designed by Italians. So, it looked good but was actually devoid of quality. Even so, I was still stupid enough to then go out and buy ….

Club & Country… which was sort of Club Football 2. Except with cartoony "amusing" graphics and the ability to manage your country - apparently. (nb. a brief note for any footy game designers. The words "Football Management Simulation" and "amusing" should never EVER be placed in close proximity. OK? Damn, I feel a rant coming on…). Despite being designed by the same people, those good points of Club Football which did exist (decent main screen, easy to get around) were replaced by fiddly little icons and drag/drop things. A pain in the ass. But I still played about 3 seasons of it..

Multi-Player Soccer Manager… I think you can kind of suss this one by its name can't you? Does it scream "Budget release" to you too? Okay listen, it wasn’t too bad. It was well designed, straighforward, fast, nicely laid out. But what it didn't have was a match sequence. That old bugger strikes again. Oh well.

Player Manager 2… this game almost had it all. A choice of about 4 different match sequences to suit everyone (a simple text one, a "scanner" one, a fancy graphics one, and an actual arcade one that you could play if you were so inclined); more stats than Championship Manager; better graphics than PM2; so many different sections that I was still finding new bits weeks later. And it even had newspaper stories that were quite entertaining to read. But it still didn’t move me. Why? Firstly, you had to play it from floppy. And it was SLOW. And you had to keep swapping discs. And it kept crashing. Secondly, there were only 15 teams in each division. Why? Who knows. And finally, another of my real hates, if you were sacked - which happened without any warning at all in this game - it was game over, black screen, start again from scratch matey boy, no chance of dropping down a division, oh no. There's a Player Manager 99 for the PC. Review anyone?

Tracksuit Manager 2… has anyone ever seen Tracksuit Manager 1? No, me neither. While the ever decreasing "hordes" of Amiga users were waiting for the near mythical CM2, along came this game to rip them off appallingly. It was an absolute Championship Manager copy, I am still amazed they didn’t get sued. And yet, it was worse than the original. What is the point of that? And full of bugs. You could sell any player for any amount, bidding clubs would just meet your demands whatever they were. At Port Vale I sold Neil Aspin for £18 million, and then bought Shearer and pocketed the difference. Amazing. Oh and you know how in CM each players match performance was rated from 1-10? In TM2 all players in your team got the same rating. Except in cup games. And don't even ASK about the match sequence. Ok, I'll tell you. It smelt of fish.

Premier Manager 3… at about the same time came PM3, a game which improved on PM2 in most ways despite not featuring the luscious secretary. The match sequence was okay….. if you got into it. You could hire an assistant to do all the boring stuff. There was more tactical input and a more realistic transfer system. But it was still basically a tweaked PM2 - if you had the original, could you be bothered? Oh I know some people swear by this game but, at the end of the day …. IT WAS STILL TOO HARD TO GET OUT OF THE SODDING CONFERENCE!!

SWOS… or Sensible World of Soccer for the uninitiated. While not really a management game, it did have elements of management, but the original release was bugged to an extent that you normally only associate with present day PC games. Even when patched it was still rather strange. Answer me this, at Newcastle how could Paul Kitson be worth £1.5 million at the beginning of a season, score 58 league goals, then only be worth £700,000? Ah the crazy world of SWOS! Oh, and it only played from floppy and had a tendency to crash. The bugger.

Championship Manager 2… the Amiga version. Never have so many waited so long for so so little. Considering the fact that CM was originally an Amiga game, it was an insult to release this. Mind you I was stupid to buy it, after reading the reviews where it scored 3%. So what was wrong with it? Well, first of all it was SLOW. Far and away the slowest game on these pages. Even slower than the Spectrum games. Do you want to wait 40 minutes for UEFA results to calculate? Do you want to wait 90 seconds for a menu to open up? And it didn’t even contain HALF the stuff in the PC version. It was, to be blunt, unplayable. But I still persevered. And found that it was too easy too. Any out of contract player would join your team for a pitiful amount. When I managed, as Port Vale manager, to buy Ronaldo, Del Piero and Kluivert all on frees, I knew something was wrong. I hated it so much it nearly ….. NEARLY …. put me off the PC game….

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