If you haven't played Player Manager 2000 or want to try this sports video game, download it now for free! Published in 2000 by 3DO Europe, Ltd., Player Manager 2000 was an above-average soccer / football (european) title in its time.
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In 2000, Ubi Soft Entertainment Ltd. publishes Football World Manager 2000 on Windows. This simulation and sports game is now abandonware and is set in a managerial and soccer / football (european) themes.
International football isn't what it used to be. Twenty years ago, as a child living in the United States, it was excruciatingly difficult to watch any televised footy whatsoever, unless you included that funny game Pele got bribed into playing on artificial turf with the 35-yard offside lines. I recall staying up way past my bedtime to watch old First Division games on public television (these were the days before cable and satellite dishes that didn't look like radio telescopes) which were often four or five months out of date and involved guys named Steve Heighway. Imagine watching the FA Cup in September and not knowing who won. These days, because I read , I knew that KP Polonia Warszawa advanced to the Champions League Third Qualifying Round before you did, and can pay $19.95 to have my satellite dish bring me Uruguay vs. Peru. Consider this my revenge. Still, it might be somewhat disconcerting to think that some guy in the middle of a Midwestern cornfield could design a better football management sim than all the collective talent at the flagship game publisher in France. In the case of UEFA Manager 2000, though, that's not an exaggeration. Infogrames may have been ordered by the French government to start taking over the world game publishing industry along with Havas Interactive, but if they release many more games like this, I foresee the game publishing equivalents of Sedan and Dunkirk in the not-too-distant future. Did I mention Compičgne?
The general idea behind a football management sim is simple: create the illusion that you are managing a real football club. Of course, since this often involves making pouty faces and talking about "sexy football," many games extend the experience to involve all aspects of club operations, like ground improvement and ticket/souvenir sales. Championship Manager has built a franchise on a database-like approach to man-management, as well as focusing on a manager's actual duties. UEFA Manager 2000 is similar to Premier Manager and EA Sports' Premier League Football Manager in that you set ticket prices, handle sponsorship arrangements, and even negotiate the minutiae of each player's contract. Want to offer Steve McManaman a sports car to lure him away from Real, but only want to pay for a compact for Edu? You can do that here. In UEFA Manager 2000 you even have to play economist, deciding when rates are advantageous for taking out a big bank loan to finance your transfers. On the face of it this might seem like unparalleled immersion, but while the details are impressive, Infogrames forgot that it doesn't do much good to paint the trim if the foundation is collapsing. There is a certain minimum level of realism a management sim needs to achieve which can be attained through simple things like putting all the right teams in the same division. While UEFA Manager 2000 hasn't put Cowdenbeath in the SPL, it practically concedes all pretensions of being a football simulation by apparently failing to obtain proper licenses. Although it may seem a good idea in marketing meetings to produce game boxes with the name "UEFA" and pictures of a pensive Kevin Keegan on them, it's decidedly less attractive to have those boxes contain games which refer to the Old Firm as "Glasgow Parkhead" and "Glasgow Ibrox." While Rayo Vallecano are indeed based in the Spanish capital, they are in no way called Rayo Madrid. Except in UEFA Manager 2000. I can't wait for this design team to do a Major League Baseball game and present us with the Arlington Rangers. This may seem like a trivial point to make until you find that the current European Cup holders Real Madrid are just called Madrid. So you have "Rayo Madrid" and "Madrid." And "A Madrid." That would be Atletico.
This crippling problem extends to the fact that all the players are listed by last name only (sometimes with a first initial if the last name is sufficiently common). Stadiums also carry names other than the ones they have in real life. A final handicap burned into the CD is the fact that while the box says "UEFA Manager 2000," this is apparently a typo, as the game we're given is "UEFA Manager 1999." Despite the fact that the 2000-01 season has already started in several major cloth-producing nations, UEFA Manager 2000 insists on making us replay the the events of last year. Remember when you didn't want to play Strat-O-Matic Baseball anymore because you only had the player cards from the previous year? Neither do I. If I did, that's what this would be like. When you start out with disadvantages like this, you'd better have a stunning game to make up for it. Instead, we get the footy equivalent of the Maginot Line: a game that's cumbersome and ugly, but easily bypassed in the end.
What UEFA Manager 2000 lacks in licenses, it tries to make up in detail. In fact, this seems to have been Item One on the design document: put as much "football stuff" as possible into the game and maybe people won't notice the missing bits. For this reason, presumably, we're given information like "Staff Morale." This should send gamers scurrying to their LaRousse's to look up the French translation of "I don't care." I mean, what's this supposed to simulate? That my physio is going through some tough times? Note to France: stick to the footy. Players in UEFA Manager 2000 have individual scouting reports, much as in FA Premier League Football Manager. Unfortunately, these seem to be either randomly generated blurbs, or reports generated by an extraterrestrial race of cybernetic Johan Cruyff/Marco Van Basten clones. Luis Figo, for instance, "needs to work on his passing." Right. Maybe his zero-G, faster-than-light, high-gamma-ray-environment passing. As far as I know, his normal "football passing" is just fine.
It is perhaps understandable that design team members weren't comfortable with something as complex as football research, since they showed a far more distressing command of simple geography. For unspecified sentimental reasons, I usually check the status of various Polish players throughout the European leagues, just to see how shamefully undervalued they are. Matysek at Leverkusen, Dudek at Feyenoord, Adamczuk at Rangers. For the most part, they seemed to be there. Except for one small detail: all but one of them were Indian. As in subcontinent. Imagine my surprise in finding that Jerzy Dudek, the Feyenoord keeper rated number one in FIFA earlier this year, was listed as Indian, and had a little Indian flag next to his name, as though the designers were personally telling me, "Being French, we find your country indistinguishable from Bangladesh. Now stop polluting our language with Franglais." The same fate befell Tomasz Klos at Auxerre, Jacek Bak at Lyon, Piotr Swierczewski at Bastia, Tomasz Iwan at PSV...I could go on. Interestingly enough, Leverkusen's top keeper (in 1999-2000), Adam Matysek, wasn't even on the club's roster. There was an Indian player listed, though. His name was "Downer." Very funny. Tomasz Hajto at MSV Duisburg was similarly replaced by an Indian by the name of "Watkiss." These aren't even remotely Indian or Polish names, so I'm assuming this is simply a not-too-sophisticated slap by La Belle France at its not-yet-in-the-EU colleague. Hey Infogrames, how about this one: "Vichy." American players on the continent were similarly misplaced, with Frankie Heyduk and Tony Sanneh replaced by Yanks with generic, American-sounding names. Scotland seems to have some kind of mind-enhancing powers conferring extra-geographical awareness, though, as both Claudio Reyna and Dariusz Adamczuk were properly named andidentified by nationality. They're both with Rangers, though, so maybe it's a Glasgow Ibrox thing. Lest you think that this India-for-Poland phenomenon is simply a prescient geopolitical prediction rather than sheer Gallic imbecility, Lazio's Juan Verón is listed as an Argentine and as a non-EU player, even though there has been quite a controversy lately about the validity of his Italianpassport and corresponding ability to not be counted against the non-EU player limit. This only cropped up after the 1999-2000 season ended, and has in no way been resolved, so I somehow doubt Infogrames has any inside info on how this is going to turn out.
One of the biggest problems the game has is the simple fact that it's almost impossible to find anything. Just finding out what position to assign a player is a harrowing experience. UEFA Manager 2000 distinguishes between "position" and "role." The positions are keeper, defender, midfielder, and attacker. These are all color-coded. Fair enough. But since it makes a big difference whether someone plays as a defensive midfielder or attacking midfielder, you have to pay careful attention to the indicated role, which unfortunately is listed in the main squad management screen as a tiny little football pitch with the player's role indicated by a dot of the appropriate color. It's not the dot's color which matters, though, since right next to the role is the position indicator, which is essentially a much bigger dot with "G" or "D" or "M" or "A" in the middle. No, to get any useful info out of the "role" column, you have to pay attention to where the dot is on the pitch. Since all of the midfield dots, for instance, are roughly in the center of the pitch, you need to see if the dot is in the middle of the center circle (central midfielder) or on the perimeter of the center circle in the defending half (defensive midfielder) or maybe where the circle crosses the center line on the left (left midfielder). Remember that we're talking about a circle that's probably four pixels in diameter. Want to know if "Anelka" is assigned to play as a centre-forward or a striker? To do this at a glance, you have to decide whether the red dot is in the middle of the penalty area (striker) or simply on the edge of the penalty arc (centre-forward). Because the area in question is so small, even the game's fixed 640x480 resolution doesn't make it easy to distinguish between the two. What I want to know is who, when presented with a main squad status screen depicting player positions as tiny little dots on tiny little pitches, said, "That looks fine to me." 2ff7e9595c
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