I decided to play some Football Manager. Not Football Manager 2015 on PC but Football Manager on the old Commodre 64.
It was first released in 1982 by Addictive Games and designed by their founder, Kevin Toms, for the TRS-80 and ZX81 computers but was later ported to the Commodore 64 in 1984.
My copy however is a 1987 re release tape version, it was also released on disk, in which you could have won a trip to the 1987 cup final (English FA cup I guess), but sadly to voucher is gone.
One of the first things I notice when I look at the back of the cover is that the game play pictures is not from a C64 but from a Spectrum computer. This is not unusual, it was often the case back then. Sometimes the pictures was from a superior computer, so you was a bit tricked when you bought a game and the graphics wasn't as good as on the cover. But in this case the C64 graphics are better then the showed Spectrum graphics.
Another thing that stand out on the back is the list of features like "Matches in 3D graphics", that pretty impressive considering the game is from 1984, and the last line "You can even be sacked!" I find to be a bit humorous.
The instructions are well written and easy to understand. But one thing had me worried, "Loading time is approximately 20 minutes", but gladly it wasn't that long. Just about 3 minutes.
Let's talk about the game. First you get to choose your team. There are 64 teams to choose from, all from the English league system, and the team you choose will start off in Division 4. There are 16 teams in each of the four divisions and you will fight to gain promotion and eventually win the 1st division.
There's an option to change all the team names anytime you want during he game.
You also get to choose the game difficulty. There are 7 different settings, starting with beginner up to genius, and you can change this any time setting during the season and also after each season you get to choose again.
There are 24 real life players, from the 80s, in the game's database. Players like Peter Shilton, Ian Rush and Bryan Robson. And, as for the team names, you can also change the players name during the game.
You get 12 of these players in your team when you start, and later you will get offers to buy one of the others after each game. You can have a total of 16 players in your team and you can also sell players you don't want.
The players are either defenders, midfielders or attackers. No goalkeeper which is a bit odd, he counts as a defender I guess. And the players have a skill from 1 to 5 and energy level 1 to 20.
Before each game you choose our team and try to out match your opponents stats. The defenders skills adds up, the same goes for your midfield and attack, and you get an average of your players energy points.
You also have a moral stat, which starts at 10 and gets higher after a win and lower after a loss.
The energy of the players will drop 1 point each game, but the players that rests gain 10.
After each season the players skill level and energy changes, so if you build up a great team, the next season the skills are no longer the same.
This is where the game gets a bit difficult. Even on the lowest difficult setting. Because it's hard to win the first games of the season. You have players with low skill and low energy and the when you lose, the team moral drops.
Each season you play 15 league games, you only play each team once, and also FA cup games.
I have played 3 seasons and haven't been able to gain promotion, but I won the FA Cup the first two seasons. The higher league teams are not so much different then the other teams.
When you start a game you get to see match highlights in, as the cover stated, "3D graphics".
So how are these amazing 3D graphics?
Well, it's not really 3D, as you can see in the photo.
More of a tilted side view of the pitch. But that can be what they thought of 3D back in the day.
Still I think it's pretty good graphics for a game like this. I've seen ordinary football games with worse graphics than this.
So what's my opinion about Football Manager on the Commodore 64?
It's a pretty decent game. Fun and addictive. And a great feature is that you also can save your game.
I will play more of this game and try to win the 1st division.
I score this 3 out of 5
