Without any animations to worry about, the kit-coloured blobs matched the game engine and didnt highlight too many flaws.Ī brain can accept a small 2D shape having a strange moment of the edge of the penalty area, as it doesnt look like a person. Words had seemed like enough, but the blob future was here and there was no going back. When one round blob smashed another, smaller, round blob into the net, all the polygons in the world couldnt have improved the experience.Ĭhampionship Manager, and a year later, Football Manager, had reached its zenith. The 30-yard screamers wed formed an image of were now played out in glorious 2D action. Words were joined with small circles running around a football pitch, and to the millions of players it was like watching the real thing. Just like you paint a picture of characters and locations read about in books, I saw my team playing and it seemed real.Īnyone who plays Football Manager to extremes will tell you how it can blur the line between the virtual and real worlds (in which its often sad to realise the team you believed were doing well is only doing so inside your PC - Spurs werent in the 2011 Champions League final and I know that now), and this phenomenon stretches back to way before the simulation started to look anything like real football. I imagined John Motson commentating, but later preferred the sound of Garth Crooks passionate screams. What was happening on the pitch mostly took place in our minds, with a bit of written commentary being pieced together into a Match of the Day highlights package running in our heads. So, while today we can watch games being played out in what looks like a reasonable approximation of football, back then all we got were words. That doesnt mean they werent totally engrossing I spent many, many hours plugging away at Premier Manager in the early 90s before moving onto the Championship Manager and then Football Manager when the great split of 2004 happened.Īll Championship Manager games released prior to this date had a word-based match engine. It now looks more like a real game of football than ever before, but for me theres only one way to play FM: overhead, 2D, looking at little round blobs run around. One area in which large strides are being made is the visual match engine. It must be tough for the developer, Sports Interactive, to find new things to add when theyve already been fine tuning the formula for over two decades.
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