Anybody miss the simplicity of the first Championship Manager game way back when. I still play it through DOS now.Don't get me wrong the FM series has been great over the years and I've pretty much bought every incarnation and stayed loyal to the great team at Sports Interactive.

Resonance music festival. The End of 1994 Season Data Up-Date Disk was an end of season update disk that updated the game's database to reflect player and club changes for the end of 1993/94 season. There was also a little known Norwegian-language version called Championship Manager Norge or CM Norge which simulated the Norwegian League.

I just feel that sometimes there is too much to get involved with nowadays. Like in CM93 you want to sign a player, you put a bid to the club - it's either accepted or rejected, next screen does the player want to join you if so then you sort out wages and it's a done deal. Or something like that.No great involvement with finances at the club or really that much with training. I just don't always have enough time and effort to get the most out of it.I love the new Transfer Rumours and News pages, great idea.Just wondered what other peoples views are on the matter?CheersDanimate.

This is where it all started for me.Bought the game after much umming and arring from Software Plus just before Christmas '93. At the time I was into the more graphical Premier Manager series, but read a review in Amiga Format and decided to get it. I do miss the simplicity!I started with 99/00 when i was in 16 and i got my first pc, Celeron 400mhz with 128mb of ram and a 4gb disk.

The glory days of Saviola, Riquelme and Aimar where your players went off injured if they hit more than 100 passes!!Simplicity at its best. You chose your team based on their stats and picked your tactic and left it at that.The next few years are going to be instrumental to the future of Football Manager. The game of football hasn't changed a lot since CM was created and there's only so far FM can go before it begins to mirror the real-life game too much and people become frustrated and bogged down in options and controls. CM93 was great at the time, and yes, if you want simple NOW, you'd play that.We look back on it as being simple, but back then when we were actually playing it, was it REALLY that simple? I'd be inclined to say that in it's day it was still quite a complex game to get your head around if you wanted to play it properly. There was a lot less choice in who you could manage and which players you could buy, but there were still win bonuses, finances, and tactics to keep on top of. That the match engine was so basic meant that you could essentially play the same tactic for every league/team and be successful.

In my view, that's not very goodOver time, we've continued to push the boundaries of our brain power when it comes to sims and strategy games, and as such the games need to continue to evolve to test our limits. Give it another 15 years and look back on FM2009 and you'll probably be saying the same thing about it that you are now saying about CM93 You can say the same about the original Sim City and the more recent ones.Or even more recently, the difference between The Sims and The Sims 2? Ah yes.simplicity.I started out properly on CM96/97 which i bought as a 'classic'.

It came in the double cd case (even though it only had 1 disc).My parents wouldn't stump up £30 for the 97/98 version, so i bought the older one cheaply and i have been hooked since!I remember when there were no scouts, just the transfer list screen. And who can forget the background pictures. What a feature that was!!!! I will always remember the selhurst park photo.i could never beat Wimbledon away for some reason!Having said that i busted out 99/00 (or maybe it was 00/01 - the one with the red case) a while back. Although it was nice to whizz through i did miss some of the features i would class as mundane such as the media, protracted transfer dealings and the in depth player personalities. I say get CM 93/94 as it has real players. I have been playing it regularly recently, continuing my Man Utd game.

I'm in the 2008/2009 season. My other save is Brighton and Hove Albion (home town), which I promoted up to a yo-yo Premiership club from Division 2. Nogan is awesome! That's in the late 90s though.Once I played a game up to the 2030s, so about 40 years. Even the managers had all retired.The European Cup is much more ruthless in format and competition, especially as the game starts only just after the ban.

In the Man Utd game I reached the final in '99 or 2000 but lost it and thus The Treble to, yes, Bayern Munich. I won the Euro Cup finally in 2005, beating Porto.Also I won the Premiership 7 times in a row after the first season.Be fine with providing any screenie requests of pics for my 2008/2009 game, or perhaps the other save for any Seagull fans out there.The Man Utd save has a couple of records gone before the last few seasons as I moved the save game from one comp to this one.It works fine on XP, although for some reason it's stopped working now so I use DOSBox. Anybody miss the simplicity of the first Championship Manager game way back when.

I still play it through DOS now.Don't get me wrong the FM series has been great over the years and I've pretty much bought every incarnation and stayed loyal to the great team at Sports Interactive. I just feel that sometimes there is too much to get involved with nowadays. Like in CM93 you want to sign a player, you put a bid to the club - it's either accepted or rejected, next screen does the player want to join you if so then you sort out wages and it's a done deal. Or something like that.No great involvement with finances at the club or really that much with training.

I just don't always have enough time and effort to get the most out of it.I love the new Transfer Rumours and News pages, great idea.Just wondered what other peoples views are on the matter?CheersDanimateI recently discovered the wonder of DOSBOX, where I can now run all the classic CM series on my Mac!!! Absolutely amazing piece of software. I say get CM 93/94 as it has real players. I have been playing it regularly recently, continuing my Man Utd game. I'm in the 2008/2009 season.

My other save is Brighton and Hove Albion (home town), which I promoted up to a yo-yo Premiership club from Division 2. Nogan is awesome! That's in the late 90s though.Once I played a game up to the 2030s, so about 40 years. Even the managers had all retired.The European Cup is much more ruthless in format and competition, especially as the game starts only just after the ban. In the Man Utd game I reached the final in '99 or 2000 but lost it and thus The Treble to, yes, Bayern Munich. I won the Euro Cup finally in 2005, beating Porto.Also I won the Premiership 7 times in a row after the first season.Be fine with providing any screenie requests of pics for my 2008/2009 game, or perhaps the other save for any Seagull fans out there.The Man Utd save has a couple of records gone before the last few seasons as I moved the save game from one comp to this one.It works fine on XP, although for some reason it's stopped working now so I use DOSBox.I'd love to see some screenies!Could you put up a premiership history, FA Cup history and perhaps the current 08-09 league table?

Here ya go!Premiership:I missed out by one point last season.F.A. Cup:Current league table:We've been having scoring problems, I bought a not outstanding bloke called Flowers, hope he helps us! We usually have great form in the latter half of the season, thanks to me setting win bonuses.I can never get a win against Torquay, always a draw. Grr.Incidentally, England haven't won the Anglo-Italia Cup since 2002 (Chelsea) and England are rubbish in Europe (though we've done well), even the Cup Winners Cup. Then over the following years I purchased the two add-on packs (CM94 and EoS update) which I bought from a small independent store in Basildon, enjoyed both of these although found the EoS update a little disappointing as it was impossible to buy foreign players.There was one version where you couldn't sell players to foreign teams, as the number of available players playing abroad filled up with playrs from England going elsewhere at the end of their contracts, and you would only ever see more go if you bought some 'foreigners' yourself.

No AI teams bought thm, as I recall.Then there was the whole other problem you mention in a different version, where it ended up with 'too few' and wouldn't let you buy them. Can't remember which order these problems came in though.Speaking of all this, remember your players would only go abraod when their contract expired, and you'd get a fee set by tribunal? Was exciting to see how much you'd get for them.Then Jean-Marc Bosman ruined it all. I definately miss CM97/08-CM01/02. They were fantastic games (nearly got me thrown out of A-levels/Uni.) I miss the times of 'to madeira'. Ronald Gomez, Assane N'Daiye and Chiotis (greek gk)Its not so much the complexity, a complex game is fine as long as you can 'delegate' some of the bits to the assistant manager.

The thing I find is that even if you could delegate a large portion of what you didn't want to be involved in to the AI, the game would still take a really long time to process. You basically be sat there watching the game churn through all the calculations.I'd like a better holiday mode, where I can say what things I want to be involved in, the assistant deals with everything else.

That way you'd keep the 'waiting to play' time to a minimum and fly through the seasons. Well i love how it gets more 'complicated' every year i love spending hours trying to figure out the best tactics for team and players. I love the financial side of the game and love how you can make transfer & contract negotiations as real as possible. If football manager ever became simple again i would probaly loose intrest because it wouldnt be enjoyable in my oppinion for a quick season with easy settings.also i would hate it if they made difficulty settings that would really put me off fm if they did that. Sorry to bump this thread.I still play this all the time and I have a few tips and tricks for anyone interested.First off, the formation.You will no doubt win the league if you go with the following formationAll central positions which makes it a lot easier when looking for players and you will need less players in the squad because you wont need 2 right midfielder's or 2 left backs for cover, which will keep your wage bill down. You can play wingers and full backs in the anchor or support position in particular if you have Giggs, he is an awesome support player and generally scores loads of goals from that position. This formation gets me promoted and wins me the title every single year, I probably lose about 2-3 games a season and draw about 2-3.

I've even won the European Cup with a third division team once promoted to the premiership, obviously with this formation, you cannot go wrong.Another tip is to purchase players that are exactly 30 years of age and are worth plenty of cash (the reason they have to be 30 is as soon as they hit 31 their value decreases dramatically). Once the season comes to an end before you click on New Season make sure you transfer list the 30 year olds at the highest price you can and then make sure you have insured them. Then when you go to New Season they will retire and you will get their value to spend in the New Season. International players are the best ones to buy, especially if you can purchase them at the beginning of the season before they're called up. This way you can purchase them for a smaller price then when they get called up their value increases and therefore you can then list them and increase their value further. Make sure you insure them as they will retire and you will get nothing for them.

This also frees up numbers from your squad for you to purchase other players, be warned tho as most of the time you will find that if you have a small squad then you'll see a lot of youngsters come through from the reserves.I've heard many of times 'I can't purchase a player on the foreign market', this may be a bug to do with your save game but in general you have to purchase them pre-season, preferably in the first week. The reason behind this was due to the foreign transfer market being only open for a few weeks back in the day, iirc. Unfortunately, Gazza and Platt are not available for at least 3-4 seasons but you can get them after this. Depending on what version you're playing Nii Lamptey (Nil Lamptey) is an awesome buy and highly recommended. You may also struggle to purchase from the foreign market due to the amount of players in it.

Make sure you don't purchase too many foreigners as you won't be able to play them all if you're in the European Cup.Let me also get this straight, you all may have heard of a cheat where if you name yourself as 'Mr Bulgaria' blah de blah de blah and choose Tranmere you'll be given over £34m to spend, well, in fact, Tranmere have this amount of money anyway. I remember seeing this cheat in all the Amiga magazines back in the day and it's always bugged me, lol.This is a screenshot of Tranmere's Info in a Demo game (no added managers). '94 Updated VersionI won't bother going into detail about players to buy as this takes away the fun of finding a great bargain etc, but Ceri Hughes at Luton normally wants to leave to go to a better club and he turns out to be an awesome player.If I can think of any more tips I'll post them up.Btw if you are familiar with WinUae then this is probably the best way to play as you can use the Warp Mode feature to speed everything up including the data crunching when starting a new season. I think 95/96 was when i started playing CM.or 96/97.and yes I think it had a lot more appeal to it back then.

I have bought every version of Champ manager since then up to the first Football manager when i thought the last version of Champ manager wasn't holding my addiction as much so I left the game for a while. I came back on the second football manager release and found it okay. The last one I have found okay. This latest I have bought and played one season, getting promoted from scottish 3rd division to the 2nd and have lost interest already. I havent played at all for about a month or so now and haven't missed it a bit or felt those cravings to play that i used to. That desire to build a team and feel familiar with all your players, tactics etc. Building youth teams who go on to star for your first team.it is just far too much hassle now.

The tactics are far too in depth for the casual gamer because these days I have to work for a living and dont wanna spend 2 hours working out what tactics work and what dont. I feel bored as hell when i play it now. Even a 3d match engine does nothing for me. Just a 'fifa' type cosmetic lift to a money making machine.which is fine all businesses have to make a profit. But come on of all the changes you could have made for this release, removal of arrows going sidewards and diagonally.addition of decimal points in player ratings.Looks to me that ideas are running thin and there is no more atmosphere in the game anymore.

It has actually become a glorified spreadsheet and database where. People may say the tactics now are more realistic than ever before but how you can implement tactics with a slider bar is beyond me.put any worldclass computer literate manager in the hotseat for a game of this and I'll bet he wont have a clue how to implement his own preferred tactics in a match winning formula!Sorry to say, but I do feel better in doing so, my long love affair with CM/FM has finally come to an end. Dont get me wrong I'm not bashing any developers for ruining a great, fun, addictive game, you cant always get it right for everybody. Its just a simple case of, this isn't for me anymore. And I know I'm not the only one (PCGamer 60 something%)but I also know some people do enjoy the later incarnations so there you go.

I just think the latest FM is one step too far into a game of mundane statistics that bores the hell outta me! As some of you already mentioned, I also play the CM93/94 game nowadays. And I must say, it is still lots of fun and still, after all these years you will find some new players who turns out to be good players.

The settled players, like Giggs, Hutchison, Cantona and Shearer, are not difficult to buy, because you know that they will be killers.But you have to play the game over and over again to find out what the good players are.Maybe it is nice to compare with other CM93/94 players which players they often buy. My favourites are:- Chris Bart-Williams (Shef.Wed.)- Scott Houghton (Luton?)- Ceri Hughes (Luton?)- John Aldridge (Tranmere) - old but good for goals- Ged Brannan (?)- Mark Pembridge (Derby)- Phil Gray (?) superstriker!!I always play with a sweeper, 2 central defenders, left-centre-right midfielders with the left and right one with an arrow back, a support man, and 2 wingers with the arrow back and one central striker. With Luton I got from Division 2 to the Premier championship in 3 years and every year with more than 100 goals.I know that there are more good line-ups, but I think it is nice to compare good players with other people. So, what young players do you always buy?