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Championship Manager 2 is a popular football management computer game. The game belongs to the Championship Manager series from Sports Interactive. The game was first released in September 1995 for personal computers. The original due date for the release of the game was much earlier but the date slipped back many times because the developers refused to introduce the game before it was absolutely ready. The Amiga version of the game was launched in 1997.
New features of CM2
The Championship Manager 2 was definitely a step forward from the earlier version especially in the graphics department. It now had the SVGA graphics along with background pictures that were photorealistic. The most noticeable new feature which was regarded by many to be a huge mistake was the audio commentary engine. In addition to the conventional text match commentary, the game also had an optional voice commentary that was provided by the popular British football commentator, Clive Tyldesley. The main criticism for this was that there just weren’t enough comments and they got repetitive and increasingly stale. Also in order to use audio commentary, the game needed to be played at a very slow speed.
Apart from this, one of the achievements was the inclusion of Scottish League in the game, although it was included only in the computer version. For the very first time during the series, you could select the league you wanted at the start. However, only one league could be played at a single time.
Playing the game
While considering the actual game play, not much had been changed from the first Championship Manager. Obviously the look and feel of the game were vastly improved, however the game was still mainly text based and menu driven. Another thing was that the user interface was similar to the previous version of the game though with a higher screen resolution.
Versions having European Leagues
Subsequently, two newer versions of CM 2 were released allowing users to play some of the popular leagues from Europe. Out of the two, first version had Belgian, Dutch and Spanish leagues and the second had German, Italian and French leagues. It was only possible to run one league at a time however this still was a huge achievement for the Championship Manager series. It also signaled the Sports Interactive's intent of spreading the game across the world.
The Amiga version of CM 2
Sterling Games released the Amiga version of Championship Manager 2. This was the first time that any Championship Manager game was developed by a company other than Sports Interactive. Sports Interactive felt that the Amiga system was incapable of running the game with the necessary standards. The Amiga version was extremely slow while running. It lacked some key features such as inclusion of the Scottish League, player’s histories, international management and the backgrounds. The CM2 game could not be installed on a hard disk. This version received a lot of flak that included 12% from the Amiga Format. The game was delayed many times for release until finally it was released in 1997.
A group called Fairlight hacked the game and released a version of the game capable of running from the hard disks. This version was capable of loading and saving the game on to the hard disk and this capability also resulted in speeding up the game by quite a bit. Fairlight asked Sterling Software at that time why they didn’t release the game with faster memory and compatibility with hard disks. This indeed would have made the Amiga version much closer to the computer friendly counterpart.
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