For 52p this game was a steal, and great for scratching a nostalgic itch for these football manager games.
But be ready for some bugs and quirks, you're going to want to be saving regularly even if you don't save-scum as crashes are sporadic and there's no auto-save feature.
Some tips I'd give to anyone giving this a shot:
- If your game crashes when selecting friendly matches, reload and let your coach make the pick. His power transcends the game, and will crash it every time you try to make your own picks from then on. Give him what he wants and let him choose the friendlies.
- When negotiating contracts, save beforehand. Some players, it seems to be unhappy ones, will crash the game if you try to offer them a better contract, or if you try to accept their requested offer. Just leave them alone and they seem to eventually come to you near the end of their contract with a non-bugged offer that won't crash the game.
- Stadium size, at least in my experience so far, is bugged. Whether you upgrade or downgrade your stadium, the actual number of seats for sale and tickets available remains the same. You'll still be on the hook for increased maintenance fees though, so unless you're RP'ing it's nothing but negatives to upgrade.
- There's a line for Merchandise in the finances, but this never seems to actually be used. 30 years deep into a couple of saves and it never makes any sort of appearance.
- The AI always seem to want about 20 to 50% over the valuation for a player before they'll accept. Not a bug, just something to note to save wasting time in negotiations.
- Manchester U must be destroyed.
- Players don't get first names, just a letter, and the regen players in later seasons seem to use a smallish pool of existing last names. So in later seasons get ready for F Messi scoring against M Messi while G Messi and a different F Messi get sent off all in the same match.
- Your managers rating and experience increase painfully slowly. It only seems to affect what size of stadium the board will approve though, and as discussed that's bugged anyway, so basically you can ignore this whole mechanic.
- I hope you like that picture of the Mitre football, because hoo boy will you be looking at it a lot as it's the single background image for every match screen.
- The scout seems to get 'stuck' on some of his tasks, typically in the 95% and above range. It's best to cancel the task and assign a new one, or it's just a wasted research slot.
- Talking of the scout, you can research cup competitions and the euro league/cup by going to your clubs fixtures list and right clicking on the name of the competition there. For some reason this doesn't seem to be an accessible option when in the scouts research assignment menu, so this is a work around.
- The news updates can be pretty wonky. If it's about transfers, retirements, or players throwing hissy fits, it seems to be accurate. But things like end of season relegations and promotions are a bit of a mess. Don't trust them.
- 4-3-3 normal and 4-4-2 Diamond with 'Direct Passing' and 'Man Marking' provide fairly consistent results, whether that's personal bias or an actual bias in the game, I do not know.
- If you tab out the game lags to hell and back. Even with 8x speed on in a match, it will be slowed to a frame by frame crawl.
- Turn off the coaches advice, it's useless and only serves to spam you with pop-ups.
- Edit: Wake up, new bug just dropped! When it comes time for your Coach/Scout/Physio to retire, get ready to cycle through a dozen replacements in the coming weeks because the hiring pool remains the same from the beginning of the game. When my coach of 40 years took his retirement, the available replacements were at least 60 years old and some nearing their 90's. After hiring one they would work for a day before retiring themselves, sending me back to the geriatric hiring pool in a couple of days. I had to cycle through a dozen or more of these elderly men before younger ones generated that didn't pack it in within a week.
- The trophy list caps at 99 entries, anything achieved after this can't be viewed in the trophy history.
- Not a bug, just an observation, but it seems like the most goals one team can score in a single match is 8. Out of several thousand matches, not once has it happened, despite many hitting the 8 goals by one side mark early on with every opportunity for more.
- We're past the 50 year mark now and things are getting weird:
- Certain international teams are fielding 60/70/80 year-olds alongside more reasonably aged regens. Edit: It seems like these players that are part of their original line-up that for some reason aren't subject to skill decay. These elderly men are both incredibly skilled and surprisingly cheap on the transfer market. £1m is the most they'll cost, but they'll be world class. They tend to want very high salaries, but considering they cost so little it's still a bargain. You WILL only get one season with them before they retire, but they're great for the season and there's a good number of them so you can buy another one when they head off.
- At the 50 year mark the prize money for trophy and league wins seems to have dropped to the absolute minimum, and has so far stayed that way. If you happen to be planning to play this game for over 50 seasons then get ready for this financial dip and plan accordingly. *Edit: So this seems to pick back up after a couple seasons, so you just have to weather the initial dip and you'll be fine.
- The general value and skill of players has been dropping. Getting a 90+ rating for Def/Mid/Atk is impossible even with an unlimited budget, there simply aren't the players out there. Where the most expensive player 20 years ago was £36m, now they're hovering around £16m.
- The Exp. for you as the manager seems literally impossible to pass 6 stars. At the end of each season it will arbitrarily drop by thousands, wiping out all progress. I've been stuck on 6 stars, around 740-760k exp. for 30 years now.
- I'm excited to see what new ways the game will break as I continue.
New Edit: Well over a hundred years into a save now, my manager a withered lich sits atop their throne, with none living who remember a time when Leeds weren't the triple champions year in and year out.
- After £1,000,000,000 the money counter breaks, and as far as I've been able to tell it stops working. Despite trying hard to spend enough to drop it again, the money counter just remains blank, forever just displaying '£'.
- When players retire or are sold, you lose manager rating. I think it is literally impossible to get the top manager level. I bought out a team of the literal best in the world for their positions, and capped out about 100k exp short of the final level. This means the top tiers of stadiums are never attainable. Not that that really matters, since they don't change your available tickets anyway.
- At a certain point something bugs with the matches on seemingly random seasons. Other teams will get to play an additional game, I have literally no idea why. My team and one other team in the league finished with the normal number of games played, while all other teams had an additional match, and the points that came with. The following season it returned to normal, but does occur again from time to time.
Overall, if you're buying this I think you probably know what you're getting into. It's an old, buggy, janky game, but it's fun and cheap, and as a result it's hard to get too down on it for it's problems.
If you don't feel like dropping a lot on a game but still want to scratch that football manager itch, you could do much worse.
