The Championship Manager series of games has been one of my favourite long running addictions. I'm not a football fan by nature, it's an interest I developed from my brother, but there's something about the games that keeps drawing me in. Whether it's the statistical analysis of player skills, the management of tactics and strategies, or just the pure thrill of managing your favourite team, I just keep coming back.
Championship Manager 03/04 is the last in the series collaboration between Eidos and Sports Interactive, before the two companies went their separate ways, and in my eyes is one of the best football management sims released. To be successful in the game takes more than just knowing which players are the best in the world; you need to be able to create successful tactics, assess player skills and performances, and build a team of players who can gel together to win matches.
To help you do this, the developers have put massive amounts of time and effort into creating a huge player database of skills; ranging from their ability to score goals, right through to off the ball, and even off the pitch skills. This could easily become a statistical nightmare but by keeping the ratings limited from 1 to 10, the development team have managed to maintain the level of detail yet keep the system simple enough for anyone to understand.
Tactics, set plays and player positions are easy to set up with a simple click of the mouse. Preconfigured tactics are available to quickly load and modify, and for the majority of the matches you play one of these tactics will give you the win. However, one of my major complaints of the game is that there are some teams that play the most crazy tactics that really shouldn't work yet do. Sometimes these tactics are so unrealistic as to make you doubt how fairly the game is being towards you. In these cases I've found it best just to accept that it's impossible to win against these teams and move on to the next match!
Graphically the game is an improvement over previous versions in the series. The introduction of a 2D pitch for match highlights brings a welcome break to the normal text based display. It also adds to the feeling of actually being right there in the dugout, short of actually shouting at the players on screen. Audio is easily turned off and not missed so I can't really comment on this as I often end up adding my own sound effects!
Overall, I found Championship Manager 03/04 to be a wonderfully addictive and well polished football management sim, stacked full of player statistics and team trivia to keep even the most avid fan satisfied. Even several years on since its release, I'm certain I'll still be playing this game for years to come.
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