Back in 1998 Santa Monica FC freeware football manager was published on Commodore Amiga computers, another from long line of sub-genre that can be summarized as "take a team in lowest division and lead it to the top". There were few countries available (Holland, Germany, Poland, England, Italy, etc) and the goal was pretty clear - lead your team from depths of 4th division to the top and face opponents in international cups.
Modern version of the game, called Santa Monica FC Online, is now available, fully working via browser and still is a single player game, which is rather unusual. Game contains several game modes, one of them is very close to the original gameplay (called Classic Casual), modernized version is called Modern Casual and contains additional options, while the most advanced game mode is called SMFC Pro. The pro mode contains far more details of your players and additional management options. The fourth game mode is interesting - called Retro Casual contains elements that emulate old-fashioned games from 8-bit computer times (pixelart and simple interface), but the twist is... the whole reality of that mode is set in year 1982, which means that Soviet Union still exist, Czech Republic and Slovakia are still Czechoslovakia, not to mention that Germany are still West Germany and East Germany.
Game contains all the basic options (training, selecting lineup, transfers, few competitions), but there is one more twist - each game can be configured using set of options at the beginning. Some of them change the rules of the game, while others change the game difficulty (including budget limitations). To make things a bit more complicated we can choose one of over 180 countries to establish our club and in each case we will be given new set of procedurally generated opponents.
While on surface Santa Monica FC Online looks like yet another multiplayer football manager the game runs autonomously different set of clubs and players for each of the users, so they don’t have to wait for another turn to be played. The only place they actually compete is the global ranking, where each season is noted and compared to other users achievements, but only those who used the same set of game configuration.
Santa Monica FC Online gameplay video
