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* my favorite PES horror story...€urosFootball !!!
- 30 July 2021
- Manchester United
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Indeed, what a great football narrative world was packed into those words: Championship MANAGER
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I was thinking for some time to create a thread where users and enthusiasts can dive deep into those magical moments of a long lost great franchise. Initially I want this thread to be exclusively related to Championship Manager versions made by Sports Interactive (actual developers of Football Manager series). That could include discussions from the first versions of the game until their last released version CM 03/04. From that particular moment SI Games parted ways with their former publisher Eidos and from 2005 they started the Football Manager project in collaboration with SEGA.
Now the big question: What made me so hooked to this particular franchise and why I think it's so special? Well, in that period 1997/1998 I was playing mostly lots of football videogames like ISS, FIFA, Actua Soccer, fully controlling a team on the field but also thriving to play those matches from a different perspective. Enjoying football moments live or on TV, I was always curious how was that feeling when a manager is in charge of a club by making with such responsibility those tactical decisions that could lead to memorable moments, discovering by himself some wonder kids like Ronaldinho, or trying to evaluate critical actions when a club had a small budget, lots of injuries, a negative view by the press, or not being sacked by avoiding relegation in some inspiring moment. Such things are like great football stories involving managerial drama and poetry.
Those were particular aspects from football that I wasn't able to discover or experience in videogames until that day when a friend offered me a copy of CM3. In that period were released some managerial games on the market like Ultimate Soccer Manager 2 or Premier Manager 97, but those lacked so much in presentation or mechanics, mostly feeling like playing some tycoon versions of football than raw football management. CM was so uniquely and seriously designed for its time, being executed like a big database encyclopedia platform where you could play and learn at the same time about football, involving narratives while navigating a simple and quick interface. The most interesting part of CM can be related to its fundamentals, where the game pushes you to experience the role of a manager by using your free will, adding day by day weight on your results with interactions regarding that particular database (news, fixtures, transfers, tactics screen, training, players, boardroom, staff...).
Nowadays SI Games expanded and evolved so much with the Football Manager formula creating even deeper and positively acclaimed experiences where you can micromanage so much that in the end the management itself feels so time consuming like a real job. From my own perspective, I still prefer more Championship Manager, not because the franchise itself was better in the past in any way, but because has a simplistic design, a very intuitive and quick user interface format, focused just on squad management and counting with a database very nostalgic to me during that period. Even if Championship Manager finished its line of successes after the abandonment by SI Games, the good part is that those original versions are available to be experienced as freeware, but also CM 01/02 is still backed up by an active community releasing fresh seasonal databases and improvements year after year. (https://www.champman0102.net/index.php)
That being said, this thread can be described as a tribute to Championship MANAGER, but at the same time could be a place for any interesting discussion, memory from the past, or even written stories about gameplay sessions involving this great franchise...
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