Championship Manager 2

Championship Manager 2 is a football management computer game in the Sports Interactive's Championship Manager series. It was released in September 1995 for MS-DOS - it was originally due to be released much earlier but the release date slipped several times as the developers refused to ship the game before it was completely ready. There was also an Amiga version released in 1997.

New features
Championship Manager 2 was quite a leap forward, in terms of graphics, from previous versions. The game now had SVGA graphics and photorealistic background pictures. Possibly the most notable new feature was the one which is widely regarded as a big mistake - the audio commentary engine. As well as the traditional text-based match commentary, there was also optional voice commentary, provided by famous British football commentator Clive Tyldesley. The major criticism of this was that there were not enough comments and it quickly got stale and repetitive. Also, to use the audio commentary the games had to be "viewed" at a very slow speed.

Another milestone was the inclusion of playable Scottish leagues, albeit only in the PC version. For the first time in the series there was a selection of leagues to choose from at the start of the game - only one could be run at a time, however.

Gameplay
In terms of the underlying gameplay, not a great deal had been changed since the original Championship Manager. The look and feel had been improved but it was still very much a text-based, menu-driven game and the user interface was almost identical to previous games, albeit at a much higher resolution.

European league versions
Two new versions of Championship Manager 2 were later released allowing users to play leagues from across Europe. One version contained the Spanish, Belgian and Dutch leagues, the other contained French, German and Italian leagues. Only one league could be run at a time but this was still a big milestone for the series and signalled the intent of Sports Interactive to expand theChampionship Manager universe across the globe.

Amiga version
The Amiga release of Championship Manager 2 was developed by Sterling Games, makingChampionship Manager 2 the first game in the Championship Manager series to not be developed by Sports Interactive, who felt that the system was not capable of running the game to a satisfactory standard. The Amiga version was very slow to run, lacked features (notable ones include the Scottish League, international management, player histories and backgrounds), it could not be installed to a hard drive, received exceptionally poor reviews (including 12% from Amiga Format) and was repeatedly delayed, postponing the release until 1997.

There was however a hacked version by the group Fairlight, who hacked the game to be able to run off a hard drive, and was able to load and save games to the hard drive which helped speed up the game considerably. At the time, Fairlight did comment why it was that Sterling Software didn't use Fast Memory and take advantage hard drive; in their eyes, it would have made the Amiga version too close in functionality to its MS-DOS counterpart.