CM06 on the PS2, quality footy management. The players database may be out of date, but it is still not easy and there's plenty of variation within the game with plenty of self-set goals :
- Win all cups/leagues with Liverpool
- Win the Premiership with the weakest side
- Win promotion from the Championship with various sides then win the Premiership at the first attempt
- Win promotion from the conference through all the divisions then win the Premiership at the first attempt - never managed the last step, good because the players you know are good at the start of the first season won't necessarily be so/attainable when you reach the top
- Win SPL with weakest side, Falkirk - maybe even the European Cup in the second season although that isn't too hard as I've done it more than once with Rapid Vienna
Even within those set of principle goals I can set my own goals, whether or not I use "approach to sign", buy only players from 1-3 nations, sell the whole squad by the end of the transfer window (takes some doing) or try to achieve the goal with the squad in hand.
Why do I love the game so much? It plays quite quickly, is hard without being too hard (Chelsea normally take a LOT of beating to the Premiership and even with some of the best players, winning all the time isn't easy either), navigation round the screens is easy and results aren't unrealistic. Sure you can get the odd big margin, but you can just as easily lose unexpectedly at home to a side struggling. It's better than any other game I've played, like the original PSone Brian Lara is still better and more enjoyable than most subsequent cricket games I've played. If only it had more edit functions and better stats it could have been perfect, and of course that annoying function where lower order batsmen start hitting fours and sixes when you have their side 50/7 say. Still managed to win the World Cup as UAE once, not managed it with Ireland to date. Shame there weren't squads for the lesser nations (Holland, UAE, Ireland, Scotland, Kenya and Bangladesh) But at least you can't just bowl batsmen round their legs etc, although the difficulty of hitting spinners and the bug that is the field going defensive before 15 overs is also annoying.
Also enjoy PES3 for the PS2, go to the master league, buy the developing players like Piliniak, Van Gogh, Eliot, Byron, Dunant etc and if they score/play much then you get points to build up their attributes. Buy Piliniak, keep him on for say 60 mins, let him take penalties and build up his shooting, speed, dribbling and stamina and then he should get 45-60 points a game and be awesome by the time the season is over. Ifonly they'd worked on the basic principle, maybe lessened the points for success, made them more a "youth team" feature and so on then it would have been great. Players do develop on current PES versions, but so slowly it is painful. If they developed like some players do in CM06 and CM07 that would be better, some attributes improve every now and then, more so if they are playing, and sometimes a whole lot will improve at once.
If you ever play CM07, it isn't as good as CM06, but if you buy VandenBorre or Hangelaand then their attributes shoot up, as do they for Semjonovs (?15k) and Voronin. It's a definite to watch out for, Basturk starts off average and then after about three weeks of the game his attributes rocket and while his value goes up near double, you can still buy him for about ?3.6m. It's not a bad version of CM series, but the games and general day to day take sooooooooooooooooooo long to go through. And players ask why they're not playing (always say "tactical reasons") and criticise you for taking them off etc. Is it realistic or real-ly pointless?
And one game on the Megadrive was quality so worth a mention, "Chaos Engine" Kinda like Gauntlet but better, one of the few games I borrowed from Blockbuster while at uni and never regretted doing so, bought it off e-bay a few years ago. Syndicate was also good but a bit long-winded, not sure how anyone would ever finish that. If you can ever get Space Invaders 90 then that is good too, a few twists on normal space invaders. There is a website which I can't remember the name of, something like freeroms.com
And one game worthy of mention from the old ZX speccy is "Rebelstar" (and II), very strategic wargame type game, alternating turns but very very strategic. Rebelstar II features characters from the Alien movies including the aliens, queen and eggs. You have 26 moves to get across the swamp, into the building, kill as many aliens as you can, take the eggs to a spaceship (looks like one out of Space 1999 not Aliens) and get on board. I generally aim to do that by killing all the aliens, without losing a life and consider it a disaster if I don't manage that. Rebelstar is one I spent hours playing when I was younger, but there is no time limit and with it set in a moonbase there are walls and ways of making the task simpler - like waiting for the enemy to pile down the corridors, get in each other's way then pick them off with a photon (weapon). The droids in the original are generally stupid, you can go in through various airlocks and they move towards greater size forces so you can go in through one airlock, shoot them up until they get too close, retreat out the airlock, enter through another airlock, they move slowly to that one and you shoot them up and repeat until there are so few left they are easily wiped out by reinforcements. In Rebelstar II you don't have the time to do it, and nowhere to hide. Alien reinforcements appear among the positions you started at so you need to move by move 12 or they suddenly appear and you're fecked.