When the annals of computer game history are written and the list of long delayed games are drawn up, the Amiga version of Championship Manager 2 will be way up there with the likes of Jet Set Willy and TFX. At least two years late. With all that development time this has got to be pretty good, right?

This was always going to be a challenge. The PC version requires a Pentium to run at decent speeds and comes on CD-ROM. Even the saved games eat up an absurd 22 Mb of hard drive. How could this be made to run on an Amiga? The original code was horrendously unoptimised. Compared to Champs Man 1, it doesn't do enough more to justify the system overhead. Extract the core algorithms, redo the code in a nice compact, efficient Amiga sort of way, re-code the database structure and yipee.

Sure, it'd require a little extra RAM and would crawl as little on a vanilla A1200, but most of us have extra RAM and CPU power these days. Not everyone has a CD-ROM drive yet, but if you skipped all the extras, it could fit on a few floppies and install on your hard drive. Sorted? If only.

The Ref's blind
Hard drives, apparently, aren't common on Amigas. As for accelerators and extra RAM, the tiny minority of users who have these add ons are surely not worth the effort. As for CD-ROMs, the CD32 died out years ago, didn't it? The gospel according to Eidos.

The result is that they asked coding house Sterling Software to write it for the most basic machines going. Ok, so it is quite nice that it will run for pretty much everyone. If the price is that it runs like a dog even on the most souped up Amiga, it isn't worth it. Therein lies the rub. Yes, it is CM2, and yes, it has almost all the features the PC version has and one or two it doesn't, but it runs far too slowly. For those of you familiar with the PC incarnation, cast your eyes to the PC vs Amiga box which explains the differences. If you are not, then here is the run down.

CM2 is a football management game in the classic mould. You can take charge of any football club in the land, You have to cope with the bottom line of all football clubs - success, on the pitch and in bank.

You need to whip your squad of wastrels into fighting shape for the season ahead, selling the duds and buying in the stars as you go. The world goes on around you with the four leagues, the Coca Cola cup, the FA cup and all those irritating internationals your players come back injured from all played out. Just about the only thing missing is the Auto Windshields cup, which no-one but a Shrewsbury Town fan would miss.

The principles are the same as every footie management game since Kevin Toms. Each player has statistics which specify the level of various abilities, from shooting to speed to flair. Theoretically the purpose of the stats are to allow you to get the right combination of players, but in practice they are just as important to inspiring reasoned debate along the "10 shooting for Berger? He should be at least 18! Are these people S%@£!ing insane" lines. Once your eleven players are selected, you just do your tactics and off you go to gory or defeat.

Over the moon
The implementation of each of these elements is what normally makes or breaks a fotie management game, and in CM2 the implementation is excellent. The player data is if anything a little too complete, it can take a while before you have a sense of the strengths of your players. On the other hand this means that it is very in depth, and should have stat fans drooling.

The tactics screen is a model of how it should be done with custom formations easily set out by dragging players to where on the pitch you want them and dragging bars to where you want them to run.

The player database has an excellent range of search facilities which allow you to hunt through the very sizeable lists of home countries and overseas players in ay way you like. Want to search for all players called Baggio? No problem. Looking for a 15-18 year old European left sided attacker valued at less than 500k with a speed o greater than 15 and a flair of between 12 and 16 who are interested in a move? Just select the combinations and the search will be done in moments.

This is the feature that CM1 most obviously lacked and CM2 does it brilliantly. The database contains some 3400 players, not only most of the league players in England but also loads of big name players from Scotland, Ireland, Wales(?) and abroad.

Unfortunately the database is outdated, about right for the end of last season but don't expect to see Paolo DiCanio at Sheffield Wednesday.

Once the game is at hand, you will get to to find out whether all that hard team picking and tactical trickery will work. The game runs well, with a reasonable indication of what is actually taking place. There are a couple of flaws in the routines, which means that the text concentrates heavily on cycles of promising balls in, followed by defensive clearances.

Sick as a Parrot
So where has it all gone wrong? Speed. When I said that this was a slow monkey, I didn't really drive the point home. It is slow with a capital S-L-O-W. It could be overtaken by a stuffed tortoise and would eat dust in a race with a concrete breezeblock.

Calculating all the actions of all the other teams takes an absurd amount of time. Fire up your game and you'll be going a good hour and a half before you get to see your team in action.

It's not just the between game calculations which suffer. The game is full of odd little slow downs. It takes a fraction of a second to click on one of the names on your team sheet to examine their stats, but return to the team page and expect to wait as it thinks hard about nothing relevant.

On the player search screen, click on a but as they take on a ton to change a single word of text and it redraws the entire screen. The problem here is that the original code was too bloated. PCs generally have silly specs and this means programmers can get away with writing code 10 times less efficient than it could be.

Actually Sterling have done a good job in certain areas. The database searches take about as long on a 14Mhz '020 as they take on a 100Mhz Pentium, and they've implemented virtual memory paged from the floppy drive to bolster the minimal 2Mb of the Amiga.

When we got wind of all this, we strongly recommend Eidos do something about the serious lack of support for modern spec Amigas. There has been some work on the game since, so that it now takes advantage of extra memory if you have it, but really the game needs to be tweaked and recompiled in an Amiga friendly way.

In its current state, the game doesn't significantly speed up with acceleration, but with recompiling, it would actually run at Pentium like speeds on an el cheapo 68030.

What is more, it could be hard drive based. Sterling Software indicated that if there's sufficient interest, they'll consider selling a patch disk which will correct all this but both Eidos and Sterling would have to be persuaded that it is worthwhile first. Check the info pages at the start of the game for more details.

It is an excellent game but unfortunately it was never going to work on a basic Amiga with a full rewrite to the code, which Eidos did not seem to want to do. Despite this it was written without taking advantage of the hardware most Amiga gamers have these days, turning a great game into one which is almost unplayable.