Dear me, those Collyer brothers really have got quite a lot to answer for haven't they? Championship Manager in all of its versions and guises has probably been responsible for the break-up of couples and arguments of friends and brothers alike all over the world. One would imagine that if the girlfriends of brother's Paul and Mark Collyer (the designers of CM) had danced naked in front of them, clutching carnations in their cleavages and promising to be "Your slave for the day", they would hardly have raised their heads, so busy would they have been coding and testing what would be the latest version of the Champ Man saga.

Brothers Collyer kept on working to produce new updated versions of CM2 with player updates and added tweaks until the release of Championship Manager 3. You would think by now that they had done everything that it is possible to do to a football management sim - apart from allowing you to nip out for some half time coffee and a slice of orange, but when CM3 hit the shelves, it must have surpassed the expectations of even the Collyer twins themselves. Never before had us footie fans seen such a comprehensive and well, totally awesome football management game: more addictive than some of Colombia's finest exports, more complex than understanding the hormones and attached moods involved in a woman's menstrual cycle and more capacity for information and stats than a room of Braille encyclopaedias. They had hit gold. To be quite frank, nothing else really ever stood a chance - CM is seen as the benchmark to which all other similar releases are compared, let's take a look why…..

It'd be quite difficult to condense all the options and facilities of CM01-02 down into one op, but I'm going to have a jolly good go. What we're dealing with here is a beast of a football management simulation: 26 leagues, over 80000 player and staff profiles and a whole bunch of extras into the bargain. The latest version of Champ Man still works under the assumption of a stand alone PC being the primary vehicle for running the game - up to 8 human players are allowed to compete simultaneously on the same computer, although there is a network option that let's managers play CM over a LAN (local area network) which is sometimes more practical if not so frequently done.

-- The game --

Indeed, each player or staff member has his own (oh sorry! Their own; Check out Laura Gilogly the physio at East Stirling - an amusing joke by the Collyer twins), set of attributes and boy are they comprehensive. Virtually all attributes are marked out of 20, apart from those such as morale and physical condition, so you'd think that you know what you're up against. Well no, because there is a whole host of hidden attributes that can only be discovered by getting to know the player over a series of games. SO, you may be buying the next Roy Keane (someone who will have star players from your opponents making regular visits to A and E), or you could be buying the next Darren Anderton, who being prone to injury spends more time in the physio's room than on the pitch. Players and coaches alike develop their skills on and off the pitch as the game progresses and your handling of affairs in general is normally responsible for dictating how they will turn out.

Then if that's not nearly enough, there's all the media interference to deal with. The pressures on a football manager in the real world have increased drastically over the last few years and there's never a day going by without managers being harassed about potential transfers, or players being praised or criticised, or finding out that an England international is bisexual. Oh yes, CM is no different, it's all there and you learn quickly that how you respond to the media is vital in winning over the support of your chairman, fellow players and most importantly the fans themselves. I've been talking about Championship Manager in general here, but the media involvement is one of the big changes made in the latest version (01-02), let's highlight some of the other important ones:

There are probably a whole load more additions but having bought each new version as it came out, I tend to forget what feature was introduced when. You'll just have to play the game and explore it for yourself, as there is no way that I can fully describe it without boring everyone silly.

-- System requirements and other support --

Pentium 233MHz PC or better
64MB of RAM (for good performance with many leagues running in parallel)