PC: Championship Manager 5
Fifth installment of the popular series of football management computer games. It does what mere football games cannot do, for whilst they are still an action-based video game like any other, this fulfils the fan's fantasy: that they could manage their own football club, and manage it better than any real-life manager. The series has always given total control over pretty much every area of the running of a football club. Players can pick their own side, arrange transfers, control who gets paid what, who stays, who goes, what tactics should be used in each and every match, in every competition, and fight their way up through the league to eventual dominance. A minimalist title, the match action was always conveyed by text commentary flashed up on the screen, that is until the previous version, which featured a 2D representation of the match, seen from above. Championship Manager 5 has all of the features you'd expect from the series, but for this edition two areas in particular have been totally overhauled: Training and tactics. The Training mode was something of a chore in previous games, and was often ignored by even the most obsessed players (you could delegate it to your Assistant Manager). Now the training features have been made more accessible with a scale that allows the player to choose the level of detail they go into, from a broad overview to a system that allows you to account for the training routines of any given player on any given half hour in the week. All the training techniques have been devised with the assistance of professional football teams. The second area that is very different is Tactics. Budding managers can drag their players into any of 270 positions on a board representing the pitch. Not only can the manager specify what runs they need to make, but he can also say what channels he wants the ball passed into and who certain players should try to pick out with their passes.
