make sure you feed the cat. (Championship Manager 00/01 (PC))

Member Name: justinmk1

Product:	Championship Manager 00/01 (PC)
Date:	05/08/01 (110 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: updated, new options, media involvement

Disadvantages: media invovment can wreck your teams morale, no others

When most men go to bed at night they dream of women and some dream of winning the Premiership, FaCup and the Champions League back to back. If you are the second type then you will be definitely be interested in getting your hands on a seriously addictive game called Championship Manager 2000/2001

Championship Manager was the brainchild of the collyer brothers who were obsessed by the footballing world and they wanted to create a game that immersed you into the financial and decision-making world that is managerial. The game started out about 7-8 years ago and with its first release Championship Manager 1 sold quite good and showed how much potential it had. The first game gave you the chance to take over teams from the English Premier, 1st, 2nd and 3rd divisions. You had the chance to buy players, offer new contracts and sell players to balance the books.

Championship manager has evolved from how it used to be and has even more playability for each new release but Championship Manager isn’t for everybody though. It is deemed boring to some people due to it being mainly text based with no actual viewing matches. The game is based on facts, figures and averages which some people don’t see attractive when compared to premier manager and the other football management simulators.

The developers wanted to include the media in their update, because lets face it the media have a big effect on how teams perform. The media can also upset players and disturb a team’s set-up by making up transfer rumours and reporting riffs between players and managers. If the media speculate a transfer you have to answer with either 1) confirm rumour 2) deny rumour or 3) No comment. However you answer can have an effect on the teams moral.

If you want to know how good a player is you have to look at their stats. The stats have different sections e.g. Pace, Acceleration, Agility, Strength, Handling, Tackling but there are about another
20 or so other sections . The players skills are split into little boxes to make it easy to decide whether their good or bad. These sections will have a mark from 1 to 20 (20 being the best and 1 the worst).
So a player like Ryan Giggs would have

Acceleration 20 Decisions 18
Pace 20 Work rate 17
Dribbling 20 Heading 15
Strength 17
Off the Ball 19

But there are some other sections that he would be bad at for example handling and Reflexes. This is because these sections are for determining how good a goalkeeper is.
After playing the game for a while you will get a keen eye for the kind of players you want for your team. But to help you in your quest for the best players there is a players/staff search page which allows you to find the players you want in you price bracket, you can also specify minimum player stats to filter out the ones that aren’t good enough. This page also helps you to find staff like Assistant managers, scouts, physio’s and coaches. These are all needed if you are to succeed with you team.

The game does have some hidden player statistics as well, these are the one that decide whether a player can cope in the big matches, how aggressive they are, their loyalty and their proneness to injury can all be bigger factors than how good they actually are. Examples of these are Jamie Redknapp (Liverpool) and Darren Anderton (Spurs) both of them are great players but you never see them play 10 games in a row.

So how do you play it? You have to first load the country (ies) you want to play in. Next you have to type your name and then add it to the team you want to manage. Next you need to sort out the team you want i.e. sell the players you don’t want and buy the ones you do.

When this is done you will have to click the ‘continue game’ button and wait for the days to load. If you have a fast computer (over 500mhz and 64mb ram) you will zip through th
e days but below this you may experience slower loads. But don’t worry I used to play it on my old (200mhz and 32mb) so it runs on almost anything. When the loading is finished there is a large chance that you will have news of some kind. The news in the game differs greatly, you could receive a message from the board welcoming you to the club, or receive a message telling you that your player is injured or an injured player has started light training.

While you are the beginning of the season it gives you a perfect chance to check your teams finances. The finances page shows how much money is coming in and how much is being spent. You can also find out how much money you made from the last matches ticket sales, and also how much you have for transfer fees.

After all this you will get to your first match. First you have to pick your team from the players you have. The injured players will have a mark next to their name, players who are banned, on international duty or players that are tired will also have markers next to their name. From your team you have to pick which player you want for each position. This depends on your formation though because in different formations you will have different amounts of defenders, midfielders and forwards. Then you click the ‘proceed to game’ button.

At the match screen you start the game and you can choose what page you want to view. One contains the player ratings and the others show possession, your player’s individual ratings and a live league table showing you where you will finish if yours and the other teams matches finish like they are. That’s all I can really help you with but the rest is learned very quickly.

This latest release would cost you nothing over £25, this is mainly due to the fact that it’s an update containing new players and a few tweaks. The actual game is still based on the original Championship Manager 3 but it does have a lot o
f significant changes to its predecessor:

You can now ask to increase your stadium capacity (instead of waiting for the board)
You can ask for more (transfer) and (wage) funds to help you get better players.
You can ask to invest money in your training ground to make your players better.
You can postpone matches.
You can complain about a referee
There are more than 25 different countries to take part in.
There are even more players/stadiums/teams.

In this update there is also an editor that allows you to modify a team’s name, stadium, money and its players. There is also an option to add new players to the game, so you can add yourself and sign yourself up for your team (a bit confusing eh!). This comes in handy if you get bored of the game and you can mess about a bit. You could even put Manchester united in the conference

So if you like a lot of figures and statistics and overall football itself then you should definitely consider adding Championship manager to your games collection. And this game takes up most of your life once your hooked you might as well say bye-bye to you social life and your friends.

Summary: