recurring dream

heya

time, once again then, to wallow in the ways of the sentimental hygiene of nostalgia. although this, strangely, has a modern spin on it, look you see. 

it is so that i have covered what is (essentially) the same ground as i do here before, which is to say had a gander at the legendary 80s computer game what is Football Manager. for that previous look, by all means click on these words right here to be whisked away to it. or, you know, just read this. 

but, that said, whereas the link in the last bit will take you off to the wonders of the Commodore 64 version, which was, is and always shall be the best, here is (virtually) the same game in a totes different way. also on a different sort of computer. 

yes, that is a screenshot of Football Manager, or as it is for some (unknown) reason now called Football Star Manager, off of my (relatively) new mobile phone thing. sure, it looks slightly different to how it did on proper computers, but close enough. and, for those of you in a rush, the gameplay is exactly, and wonderfully, as it was. 

how did i come to get this on my phone? outside, of course, of the obvious thing of purchasing it and then downloading it. a quite rare instance of web, possibly social media (i do not recall the specifics) advertising actually working on me. leaving aside any accidental taps or clicks, a quite random guess or similar calculation, for me, would be that for every ten thousand (give or take) bits of advertising i am presented with on the internet, it's a miracle if i click on as many as one. but, when i saw the familiar face of Kevin Toms (more on that later) flicker up, i was immediately interested. so much so that i clicked, looked, liked what i saw, and bought. 

does internet advertising work? yes, kind of. in this instance, it just made me aware of something that i would have bought as soon as i knew of it. so, the advert did not make me buy it as such, just alerted me to the fact that i could. rather like when i get mails or other such (similar) notifications that the David Bowie Estate has made available another thing to buy. it is not like i need all that much persuading or coercion to hand over any amount of money which takes their fancy to request. 

so, the game itself. yes, as you can see in the above (and if you recall the original), it stays faithful to the original game in many respects. divisions are made up of just 16 (sixteen) teams, and you only play each side once, no home and away nonsense. further, and also yes, as you can work out in the above, it is not so much that i am a master of the game (well, i am), but it is perfectly possible to set the skill level really, really low and win every single match. which strangely does not make the game any less fun at all. at least not for moi. 

for a bit of nostalgia (or history, if you are not, like me, an increasingly doddering, dithering old f*** and didn't happen to be there "at the time"), it was so that Football Manager was one of them "rites of passage" games, expected to be owned when you got your first (or second) computer (or even third). owners of the greatest computer ever, the Commodore 64 (of course) were expected to have this, Impossible Mission and Bruce Lee. with the latter being a pirate copy taped off of a mate's pirate copy, as the original never ever appeared available for sale anywhere. 

one particularly unusual aspect of this computer game is that the bloke what made (or programmed) (or designed, since that is what it says on the box) the game had his picture on the cover. this was not the norm. actually, unfairly, it wasn't really standard for the game developers names to be so prominent. a chosen few were, mind. if you picked up, for instance, an Activision game and it said it was off of David Crane, you knew it would be ace. similar, other names came to be known, such as Tony Crowther and Jeff Minter. 

right, the game. how does it differ from the Commodore 64 version? for starters, it loads somewhat faster. and by somewhat i do indeed mean considerably. infamously the tape of the game took a neat, round twenty (20) minutes (not a typo) to load up. this mobile phone version sees you press the icon and boom, off you go. further, or also, and this one is a massive plus - you can save your game on this new version of it. as i remember, you could not on the Commodore 64 one (at least not on the tape version), but this might have been a feature of Football Manager 2, which i played somewhere along the line but do not remember ever owning. whereas it was kind of nice always starting from scratch, this works out all the more better. 

if you clicked on my initial link above too, i can very happily confirm that it is not possible for your brother to completely knack your hard work by just leaving someone pressing the space bar down, whizzing through all options and eventually leaving you playing games with only 2 or 3 players in your team. this was a flaw that one suspects Kevin Toms never contemplated, but all the same has addressed it. nice one, squire. 

any real negatives to the game? well, yes, one major one. when it comes to each match, you can select to just skip it, watch the "new" style (pictured above, earlier) or watch them in "retro" mode. of course i clicked on retro, expecting (presuming) to see them classic, chunky Commodore 64 players in action. that is not what happened. 

my friends, what you think you are seeing is indeed what you are seeing. yes, sadly, retro mode takes you to the world of the ZX Spectrum, where graphics or whatever all had to be just one colour. quite a shame, and a missed opportunity. perhaps there will be some "update" or other such "patch" to fix this issue, i don't know. would be nice. 

with respect to the game itself, by modern standards it is amazingly simplistic, but back then it was totally amazing how much you could do. management of a football team involves buying and selling players (you can do one of each a week), selecting the side, taking a loan if needed, and that's it. as time has gone by, football manager games have become exhaustively complex. which is good for those who like the strategy side of it, but bad for we, the people like i, who just want some simple and straightforward fun. 

let me assure you, as per the original release company name states, this is well and truly addictive. i have found myself fiddling with this long after bedtime, saying "go on, just one more match, then". only now when i do that i do not have Mum knacking us for not going to bed on time on school nights. there are some benefits to being (ostensibly) grown up.  

one extra added to the game, and a very welcome one, is the presence of the European Cup. this is in addition to the league (of course) and the "cup" regular, which is presumed to be but not explicitly stated as being the FA one. so far i have won the European Cup a few times, and yes, i can qualify that by saying i do indeed leave it on the lowest skill level. 

something what is even more excellent about this new version of Football Manager is the price. this game, at least for my phone and at time of writing, costs a mere one solitary penny south of £5. most agreeable indeed, especially as this is considerably south of what the tape for the Commodore 64 cost.

do i recommend or suggest, or endorse, investing in this new Football Manager game? it most certainly has my blessing, for what that is worth. since i have borrowed some pics to comment on it (fairly, i do believe), here are some links to go get it - 

Kevin Toms on that there Facebook can be found by clicking here. 

Kevin Toms official site, linking to this game and more, is found via clicking here. 

certainly not for the first time and (probably) not for the last i am not so sure i have "done" a review, of sorts, properly. but, if there is some decent, or useful, sort of information or insights in the above, nice one. 

right, off i go to probably play the game some more. but in conclusion, yes, it is a faithful adaptation of the original, and that is a very good thing indeed. for me, at the least, and for you if you were also a fan of this tremendous, groundbreaking (at the time) game. 

now, if only someone would make it so that you could have the Bruce Lee or (maybe even better) the Frankie Goes To Hollywood game on my phone, and then maybe i might not ever sleep again, or only when the battery on it goes flat. 

be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!