Championship Manager ruined my education (Championship Manager 01/02 (PC))

Member Name: Eazysteve

Product:	Championship Manager 01/02 (PC)
Date:	23/08/09 (55 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The game that keeps on giving

Disadvantages: Would have scored much better GCSE results if I didn't have this game

This is the game which probably single handily made me get much lower grades in my GCSE's than anything else. The thoughts in my head during the spell of my life went something like this. Shall I revise maths? Well I can do that on Championship Manager. If I have £20m in the transfer kitty and I want to buy a player for £24m how much more do it need to raise?

Anyway as I'm sure you can guess I am a great fan of the Champ Manager series and the 01/02 version in my opinion was the mos superior. Compared to its predecessors the database was so much larger giving access to hundreds more players and leagues to plunder for the next star of my award winning team.

It is the sort of game that you can pick up and say "I'll just start a new game and sort my team out and then switch off tonight" and then end up staying up until the early hours of the morning because you have that all important champions league clash with AC Milan to face and no defenders fit to play!

The game on the whole, so long as you had a good pc, was very quick to run. The per cent bar at the bottom would shoot through between days and you could easily be at your next fixture within a few clicks if you so desired.

It also made for a great multiplayer event. I was in the fortunate position that I could link two computers together and run one game over two screens allowing a friend and I to take control of two teams and do our preparations at the same time. Saves time keep swapping seats to make our changes. The link up was very simple also. A matter of one person starting a game and the other person entering an IP address which was displayed at the top of the screen when in network mode.

All of the instructions were very clear and it was easy for a first time player to get involved with the game and not get overwhelmed by the huge amount of players at their disposal.

Longevity is an issue with this series as each season we get a new instalment to play with extra features to learn. However, what makes me keep going back to this edition is the easy to update editor system. This allows gamers to update players clubs delete people who have retired and replace them with that next young star from your club. This feature has meant that I have started numerous new games with up-to-date squads on a format that I love. Perfect!

But I do have one small issue with this game. The addition of the contract protection idea (Something which never took off in the real world). The creators put this feature in without it being 100% confirmed by the football world and means that gamers have to keep renewing their players contacts for fear of losing their star players for next to nothing even though they may have loads of years left on their huge deals. Gets slightly annoying in my honest opinion.

But this is my only fault to an otherwise superb game. If you have this tucked away somewhere in a cupboard and haven't played it for a while because your on a more up-to-date edition just slip it into your PC for a while and see if you go back. I find it hard to.

Summary: Great game from a great series