Premier Manager Ninety Nine

First things first. Premier Manager Ninety Nine does not fix the most egregious flaw of Premier Manager 98. It still asks for all fifteen slots of your PS1 memory card to itself. Your Colin McRae Rally records? Your twenty hour save file on Final Fantasy VII? Forget them! Or spend extra for the right to play for longer than one session in this one game. That’s only where the problems with Premier Manager Ninety Nine begin, though.

None of the other problems of Premier Manager 98 are fixed either. At its core it’s the same game with another season’s updates. It remains as ugly as anything. My actions felt even further removed from what was happening on the pitch. As apparently relegation-threatened Swansea I was near the top of the table after a series of 5-2 victories and rarer 5-2 defeats, achieved by means of… doing just about nothing except changing the default tactics to counter-attack. That may have been due to choosing an unfamiliar team, as in old school Player Manager 2 style the game didn’t seem to give me a choice but to land in the bottom division. That might just have been me misunderstanding its interface, though. Player ratings and transfer prices seem random and unconnected, although you will get turned down even when offering the price asked for anyway.

Did I mention that the interface is somehow worse than Premier Manager 98? The main menu is like some kind of dadaist artwork. There are eleven icons to select different things. You can move the cursor between them, not by moving it like a mouse pointer but merely by use of the up/down/left/right directional buttons. Which renders the decision to keep it as a cursor slightly bizarre. Anyway, these eleven icons are not arranged in orderly fashion but in a haphazard and asymmetrical way, so you mostly have to take a lucky guess which one your button press will take you to. There is also a player’s shirt that is part of the background image but looks very much like it might be an icon. The icon near to that in the middle, of a player’s shirt, is several times the size of any the others. It is for playing the next match and is therefore important. Sensible decision to make it easier to get to, right? No, wrong. Press right from the icon to its upper left and the cursor will skip straight past the match option. You have to do a complicated dance to find your way to actually moving things forward.

There are a couple of things to be taken from this sticky-taped together mess. One is that it’s the best proof yet of how much the PlayStation turned gaming in the UK upside-down. In 1995 the clear majority of games sold were for home computers, and that was where football management games found their logical home. By 1999, the Premier Manager series was continuing separately on the PC, with a series of much better games with the same names. But they couldn’t beat even a horribly compromised version which could be played on the leading console.

The other thing is not from the game itself, but from an article on Vice called These Guys Played ‘Premier League Manager 99’ for a Thousand Seasons. Although the title of the article is closest to EA’s rival game The F.A. Premier League Football Manager 99, it’s clear from the screenshots and the article in the original Italian that it is Premier Manager Ninety Nine for PlayStation they are talking about. I got fed up with the game after less than a season (okay, less than an hour), so I can only salute their efforts in playing through 1,000 of them. They have been to the year 3000. Since the game, at most, simulates football, they can’t tell us much about the future and whether we live underwater, but they can tell us something about how Premier Manager Ninety Nine stood up to this extended test:

“We loved its little quirks, such as the way it misspelled players’ names and the constant technical glitches – it wasn’t trying to be fancy like other modern games.”

“After we played it past a certain point – around the year 2300 onwards – we entered what we called the “nonsense seasons”, when the game stopped making much sense. The game had established a retirement system for the players, but the new generation of footballers were terrible. If you didn’t have one of the handful of players who were any good on your team, you were guaranteed to lose – or at best draw 0-0. Due to the imbalance between teams with so many terrible players, the game was constantly throwing up scores like 10-0 and 11-0. Most of the time, one team would barely make it past the halfway line. By 2480, Reggiana had the only good player left in the game, so they ended up winning 39 consecutive Serie A championships.”

I can think of no better illustration of how much the value of games can be determined by what their players themselves bring to them than the work of these two intrepid souls.

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Top of the charts for week ending 23 January 1999:

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