F.A. Manager
It's been a while, but this is only the second football management sim I've come up against. The first was a treacle-slow monolith sponsored by the other legendary Mancunian football coach who managed to get out just in time before his club fell to pieces, and it was pisspoor. The puny PlayStation hardware isn't built for this sort of number-crunching, and in such a low resolution it's not a straightforward task to design a UI which can convey appropriately the masses of data which needs to be easily available to the player.
There's something so attractive about that late-90s 'ITV Champions League' font.
F.A. Manager has a better go of it, though. Despite dropping almost four years before Alex Ferguson's Player Manager 2002, it is a far smoother and nimble experience compared to the borderline-unplayable loading simulator with the watch-tapping Scot on the front. You can actually sift through teams and players with relative ease, though it seems the tradeoff is that large amounts of data are actually obfuscated or abstracted away into single 'rating' figures and the like. For a console management sim, though, that's not a hopeless idea.
You can make subs (From your bench of 3. It's 1998), but it's not clear whether players actually tire during the game.
'In-game', there is a pathetically small 'live action' window showing highlights as the game is ongoing, complete with commentary. It's difficult to tell for sure, but is it using the same Gremlin engine from Actua Soccer 2? Such a thing would certainly be weird, given F.A. Manager would be a direct competitor to Gremlin's own Premier Manager. You can also just skip the whole 'watch the game happen in bits and pieces' stuff altogether, and just pick 'Instant result' to quickly simulate your 3-0 home defeat. Setting up loans and transfers is very easy, though obviously several worlds away from the levels of bartering and contract fine-tuning as there is in a modern Football Manager.
City in League One? Who knows...
That's the thing. Management sims have moved on so much in the past twenty-odd years that going back to these turn-of-the-century jaunts is a bit like playing the original, 2D Microsoft Flight Simulator when a modern version which actually simulates flying far more accurately is available. Even with MFS, you might go back out of a bit of nostalgia, but with F.A. Manager it works even less with a player roster that you no longer recognise. All these discs are now are gaming curios.
Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10
The F.A. Premier League Football Manager 2001
I've properly puzzled myself, here. After looking it up, F.A. Premier League Football Manager was a series of EA Sports football management sims that was mainly made for MS Windows, but a couple did see an entry on the original PlayStation (the first being 2000, which I've not bothered with). I had no idea about that, which is fine because I don't pretend to possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of the console library (...not really). What I did remember was EA Sports having a swing with a game called FIFA Manager on the PlayStation 2 a few years later.
No, it's not that series.
Alas, I can actually find zero record of the PS2 FIFA Manager of which I am thinking. It appears that the actual EA Sports football management game (which had a whole series attached) was actually called Total Club Manager and received two games on PS2 before returning to Windows-only under the name FIFA Manager a few years later. But...Total Club Manager isn't the game I'm remembering. As a matter of fact, I've never even heard of Total Club Manager. I distinctly remember reading previews in Official PS2 Magazine for a strange FIFA/Premier Manager hybrid where the hook was that you could sit down with a 3D-modelled Rio Ferdinand (in a suit) and tell him he wasn't having his contract renewed. I'm not bloody imagining it. It was real. But hey ho, I'm unable to find a record of this game on the intertubes. All I can surmise is that it was a game that never actually got released, or perhaps became Total Club Manager - which is decidedly 3D-Rio-free and is a classic-style menu and spreadsheet simulator.
It's kind of cool that you get these sorts of post-match finance breakdowns.
So what about Football Manager 2001? You know what? I don't hate it. It makes the most of the licencing agreements that Electronic Arts had up to their eyeballs, granting the player the ability to manage a club in the titular Premier League, and compete in the various cup competitions including the Champions League itself (rather than a generic 'European Winners League' or somesort). More interestingly, you are able to edit the team and player database directly - this goes all the way down to the Conference (now called the National League) and even beyond that into 'Non-League' where you can fiddle around with the roster for such soccer heavyweights as Merthyr Tydfil. You can't manage in these leagues though, so what's the point? Can't work that one out.
Not even Denis Bergkamp could have saved the Swans from relegation in 2000-01, but I gave it a go.
At first glance, it looks like EA Sports also found themselves able to copy Gremlin Interactive's homework and lift the 3D game engine from their own FIFA 2001, meaning a familiar experience if you choose to watch your game highlights (rather than cheekily skip it with the 'instant result' button). There's more than meets the eye, though. I've not got around the playing the FIFA series wholesale yet, but I did play enough of them back in the day for my spider sense to tingle when the 3D match engine loaded in. This isn't FIFA 2001...this is FIFA Road to World Cup 98! Or possibly FIFA 99. It's puzzling why they used such an old version of FIFA to inject into their trailblazing management game. All I can guess is that the first of these management games was Football Manager 99, and they just never bothered updating it.
The crowd go wild at an extremely optimistically-modelled Vetch Field.
The other oddity is that the commentary provided in highlights is crooned by Andy Gray and an extremely bored-sounding Martin Tyler, who speaks with an air of someone who wishes someone else would explain just what a 'video game' is to him before he is asked to read out some of these generic commentary lines into a microphone. I don't know why Martin Tyler is there at all - for FIFA games they made the most of John Motson until FIFA 06, though Gray and McCoist variously acted as voice doubles for each other through the whole decade. So if someone asks you which FIFA game was the first to utilise the tones of Martin Tyler (this will never ever happen in your life), expecting you to answer FIFA 08, catch them out and say that it was actually F.A. Premier League Football Manager 2000.
The 'EAMail' function is spookily foreshadowing the actual Football Manager we'd get a few years later.
Not much else to say about this game, other than the fact that it was one of the few dozen PS1 games which used LibCrypt (an interesting explanation of the whole thing here), which meant I had to spend some time digging up a .SBI file to drop into the emulation folder before I could get this one to even boot. It's probably the best of the management games I've flighted with so far.
Kept my attention for: A few hours
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10
The F.A. Premier League Stars 2001
So why would EA Sports release both FIFA and a pretty random game called F.A. Premier League Stars? By 2001, all the licencing existed in FIFA, down to shirt sponsorships and foreign leagues nobody cared about like MLS. I don't really know what the market for FAPLS really is if people were already hooked on FIFA; ISS Pro was already different enough to carve its own little hole into the minds of football game fans.
I tried forcing a forfeiture in season mode by getting too many players sent off, but the game glitches out and just makes you play the game again.
The game is totally different too, not just a cut and paste of your regular FIFA programming with a different title. It feels a bit snappier and commentary is delivered in a OK-for-the-time effort by Clive Tyldesley (rather than Motty) and once again by Andy Gray, who was presumably ready to accept the coin from any half-baked football game peddler to make some tired wisecracks (nothing about female linesmen, though). I had a bit of fun with it. I couldn't work out the 'Stars' system, but I think it's pretty plain that this was nothing more than a gimmick.
Rest in peace.
It does borrow a few things from stablemate FIFA 2001 - in particular the 'power bar' which is used to decide whether your player has a foot like a traction engine or whether your shot pathetically phuts a few feet forward. It also borrows the usage of R1 to perform an intentional 'professional foul' and pointlessly obtain a red card for your troubles - I don't believe this 'feature' ever made a recurrence. All the Premier League grounds circa 2001 are faithfully modelled; bringing a nostalgic tear to the eye of those who miss the old fashioned 'proper grounds' with corrugated roofs and corners open to the elements. At least Old Trafford hasn't changed (yet).
There's a star under your current player. Because it's called Premier League Stars.
The problem was that despite all the bluster about the Premier League licence, FIFA 2001 already had that - and also had the three English divisions below it, and a dozen from the rest of the world. Why would you bother with this game other than as a curiosity? It's not hard to see why there was no Premier League Stars 2002 on the PS2.
Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 5/10
F1 2000
Whilst I'll watch more or less any sport if it happens to be being broadcast on TV and I happen to be sat in front of said TV at the same point in time, motorsport isn't something I ever really devoted much thought to. But I know a decently put-together game when I see one, and F1 2000 is a decent enough game.
The frame rate really suffers when there are a lot of cars about. So at the start of every race, then.
We were still a long way away from anything approaching a 'sort of realistic I guess' driving simulation game full stop, let alone F1, so the game is pretty 'arcadey' in terms of controls, despite the feel of prestige that the presentation attempts to give. That doesn't make it 'bad'; just not particularly difficult. In fact, the challenge that comes packaged with F1 2000 is actually having to get over technological hurdles with the hardware. When you're travelling at 200 miles per hour, a draw distance that turns into pixelated gunge 100 yards ahead is not helpful, and neither is a chugging frame rate. It takes some getting used to, and the first few laps of every race are actually an exercise in memorising the corners so that you can try not to blindly fly into them on the next go around.
Car damage is a thing, but being punished for deliberately breaking the rules doesn't seem to be.
It's decent enough when you get the hang of it, and the feeling of watching a TV broadcast is pretty close. I don't think 16 laps is particularly fun in any racing game, though.
Kept my attention for: Half an hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 6/10