1986 D&H Games (UK)
Written by Tony Huggard and John de Salis
Before this game there were only a few others like 'Football Manager' and clones.
And if 'Football Manager' created a genre of strategy games, 'Football Director' managed to push the genre a little further.
The chance to play against a friend, for instance, is a great feature. But there are a lot more, like youth teams, where you can "grow" your future stars.
The game doesn't have any action scenes, you watch the games highlights on text, such as goals, faults, and injuries. All in "real-time" (in fact 90 minutes will only take about 3 minutes).
All of the game is in text. No graphics whatsoever. And you would except some monotony to install. Wrong!
From beginning to end you have an exciting football management game, that still is fresh and very playable today.
An unfathomably popular football management game. This game is written in BASIC and is extremely slow. You'll spend most of the game staring at a please wait message.
But that's not really the problem. The main gripe I have with the game is how unfairly difficult the game is. As soon as you scrape together a vaguely competitive team, the difficulty level automatically increases giving the opposing teams vastly superior players. Even if you do manage to win a few games and find yourself at the top of the league your club will still manage to haemorrhage money every week. This makes it almost impossible to finish a season without going bankrupt and getting sacked.
Football Director has some nice ideas, scouting, youth teams etc but it's let down by it's unrelenting difficulty.
