The Goldfish Chronicles

It’s time for my yearly gush over my favourite computer game. I started playing it when it first came out on the Commodore Amiga, around 1989 or something (random guess). It’s been swallowed by Eidos, lost its name but not the source, and continued to charge on, always gaining huge sales in the UK and I presume elsewhere.

Nowadays the software is called Football Manager, which incidentally was the name of the first computer game I ever owned in 1983 or something like that on the BBC ‘B’. Its released each year with game tweaks, updated data and new ideas. Here’s why I think this software rocks:

• Test of time. For 15+ years it has been THE football management software. Nothing else has compared. Achieving this is hard, but a huge part would seem to be that the people behind it have a genuine love of what they are doing. Apart from an Ice Hockey management game, they mostly seem to have focused on this genre (okay, Baseball as well, forgot about that one).
• Community. The data is compiled by fans around the world, not by a commercial entity. Eidos, who have kept the old name of Championship Manager and have released a dud under that brand switched from working with the community to working with a hried company, SI Games kept with the community.
• Depth vs Imagination. The trick to a good ‘god-game’ is to offer lots of depth, but not to get in the way of the ego of the player. CM/FM has always been great at that, it’s not a game, it’s an exercise in megalomania.
• Reality. Football is a mess of corporations and sponsorships nowadays. Getting permission to use real names, kits etc seems to cause trouble with software all the time, but the CM/FM developers have always managed to use the real names.
• Depth (again). 158 leagues in 51 countries, massing 2351 clubs and 270,000 players. Plus all the countries at the national level. It’s odd they don’t have some countries; such as Japan, Canada and more African countries than South Africa. I presume that most of these are down to commercial reasons; not likely to drive enough sales. Japan seems odd though, maybe they hit legal issues.
• No difficulty levels. So many games have artificial systems so you can define how hard you want the game to be. In CM/FM you do this by the choice of your team. Very natural, and it works.
• PC/Mac. The latest version ships with a CD that has both Mac and PC versions. No more having to pay twice just to be agile machine-wise.
• Start screen has an description of your addiction level

There are some negatives. A year after I get Football Manager 2005, I get Football Manager 2006. The cost isn’t a problem (actually I make my parents buy it for me each year ), but there’s no update ability. I can’t see any way to update the game engine of a 2005 game to the 2006 engine. The second negative is that it uses some kind of copy-protection software. Never been a problem until the latest one, in which I had to uninstall CloneDVD. Not a problem as I don’t use it, but figuring that out saw me deleting the 2005 install in case that was the problem.

The last negative? I need more time and I need a powerful quad-CPU Windows machine if I ever want to run all 158 leagues.

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 25th, 2005 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.