Kiss your social life goobye! (Championship Manager 00/01 (PC))

Member Name: Ooze

Product:	Championship Manager 00/01 (PC)
Date:	31/10/00 (1505 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's depth and all round entertainment

Disadvantages: The editor, the DVD box (where can It go on my CD rack?)

Championship Manger 00/01 is the latest in a series of football management simulations indeed it’s probably the best series in the football management simulation world and Champ Man 00/01 is probably the best football management game ever! Possibly even a contender for the best PC game ever. It really is that good.

However I’m writing this opinion from the point of view of an avid football fan and although it easily holds my attentions, if you don’t love football maybe it won’t make such a lasting impression upon you. Although the game does provide the player with a ‘buzz’ it isn’t quite the same as fragging an opponent on Quake so if you’re only into the fast action of a first person shooter than perhaps again it’s not for you. However the game should and does appeal to a huge audience and the series has captivated that audience. I won’t go into detail about the series but I will take a look at the game for you.

It’s easily the most detailed management simulation, and I couldn’t possibly give you all the detail. The basic concept is to ‘manage’ i.e. through tactics, transfers and ideas etc. a football team. Be it Manchester United or Leyton Orient the targets that your management should achieve are different. Ok so the concept is nothing new, we’ve seen Premier Manger, another management sim like it. But Champ Man 01/01 takes it into new depths.

The game itself based on the Championship Manger 3 engine and is more or less an update of Champ Man 99/00 but with a few additions, either way it’s a fabulous game. There are no fancy graphics so you won’t need a rock of a computer to run it either. Although if you want to run multiple leagues then you will probably need a lot of RAM, with 128mb I get away with running 10 leagues but even this can get a little slow.

Basically it’s just a system of databases and spreads
heets, each player has a list of statistics which give you an idea of where the player is best suited and what part of the game he will perform in. The statistics are out of 20 (20 = excellent), Although it sounds simple there are simply loads so the possibilities are endless.

The basic premise is to win matches, be it division 3 or Premiership whatever. To do this you need to spend hours designing your tactics and searching for players with the statistics you need. For example if you’re going to play a counter attack game get some quick forwards with good positional play. I won’t go into anymore detail but it’s tremendous.

I’m not going to say much more about how to play, I’d be here all day, but the thing that’s most appealing is it does actually feel like you are managing a team, you can do everything including training. It keeps you hooked and because it’s so deep and you have to concentrate the buzz is all the better when it comes to getting a ‘result’. I can’t think of any other game that recreates the cup atmosphere like this, I just long for the FA Cup draw to be made. It does all this without even a graphic and no notable sound.

Anyone who has read my Champ Man 99/00 opinion will be able to tell that so far my opinion has been very similar, however there are some excellent additions to this new game. Notably the depth (that I thought was almost unbeatable in 99/00) has been extended to such a point that I sent 4 hours the other night without even clicking continue (don’t brand me sad but I sorted my tactics out and I spent ages looking for suitable players). This is mainly due to the fact that the databases have been expanded, indeed now there are 55,000 players in the normal database and 85,000 in the maximum one – chuff me I hear you say. Not only this but you can now take control of teams in any of 26 divisions (99/00 only had 16), from the R
16;normal’ one like England to Croatia, Wales or even Finland. This depth has to be the games best aspect and will keep me away from a social life for months to come.

Now as you’d expect, all the data has been updated, to be in line with the start of the season, and SI has already issued an update that has all the latest transfers like Stan the man to Bradford (www.cm3.com), however I will come onto the update later. There have been a number of other tweaks, such as the match engine has been adapted to show the 10yard dissent rule, and it certainly isn’t as easy to win matches, the computer AI has been greatly improved. During a match you can view a ‘live’ league table, allowing you to plot your clubs position changes (be warned this slows down the game a bit). The staff options have been improved. In the previous version coaches and the like had ratings that didn’t fall in line with their ability but now what you see is what you get. You can also ask for reports on players which is great. There are many tweaks around the game but you’ll have to play about a bit. There are another two notable features, firstly interactive media involvement. Yes you now have to interact with the media, so if you have a bad run you will be criticised, or if you approach the FA about a referee then this will likely make the news, and one final addition is that this game comes with an Editor, which allows you to update the data as things happen in ‘real’ life.

However much as I love the game there a many flaws I am afraid. Firstly the editor. The game is tremendously user friendly however the editor is not, and is quite difficult to work out and easy to make mistakes, also you can’t add injuries using it, quite disappointing. The media interaction is wonderful, but if you’re in a lower league you’ll see very little of it. I know this is true to life, especially concerning national pres
ses, however I would love to see a message saying that a regional paper has criticised my management, whatever.

However I’m more than a little disappointed with a couple of areas. The first concerning the data, the update and the bugs. The game is horribly riddled with bugs especially the version you buy (3.81), you can have a game where not one pass is made, or see Kevin Keegan get appointed manger of England and there are many players missing or at the wrong clubs, notably this is after the patch. The patch updates the game to 3.84 and is found on the cm3 website (above) and is 11MB in size. Now most bugs are fixed and it also updates the data like Stan at Bradford and Freedman at Palace, however it seems to have concentrated on the top leagues, and many players at lower sides, have either moved or have injuries or whatever. Once I had installed the patch the game ran well, however my star players had been removed from the entire game – ug). Last night they added a new patch v3.86, a massive 13mb, but it's definately worth it, lots of bugs are finished and the data has been updated. I'm pleased SI have fixed most of the problems, but would it not have been better to fix them before the game was released?

My final little annoyance is that the manual that comes with the game is quite frankly rotten. Now it does cover the key features which will help newbies get into the game, however it spends no time on the new features like the media, it doesn’t cover any rules for individual leagues and overall is not really much help. However this aside, it’s a wonderful game – the best ever, and a new patch will be made soon to fix these remaining problem (I hope), I know I’ve written a lot here but it’s not nearly half of it, the Colleyer brothers have made another wonderful game.

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