I don't know how many times I have said this about Championship Manager 3-probably because I haven't been counting-but it definitely isn't a phrase I just came up with yesterday. This is obviously not in keeping with the sentiment expressed, since if I truly had the courage of my convictions I would only need to utter those words once. In fact, my ubiquitous use of the above phrase is quite a paradox when you consider that besides dressing up as a member of the Afrika Korps and conducting armored raids up and down my street, CM3 is the leisure time activity I tend to waste the most time on. There are quite a few football management simulations out there. Most of them are games. The Championship Manager series is not. In fact, it taunts you with that very word. "Game?" it says. "You want to play a 'game?'" Then it humiliates you, steals your lunch money, and sends you scurrying off in defeat to play some simple, easily mastered "game" like Falcon 4.0. Because Championship Manager isn't about gaming. It's about creating a virtual soccer world inside your head and inside your computer that will eventually convince you that you have the perfect strategy that will surely take Chelsea to the top of the Premiership. This time. Several hours later, mired in mid-table mediocrity and facing another Frank Leboeuf suspension, this time for assaulting a taxi driver, you'll be driven to utter the hollow oath at the beginning of this review. Happens to me every time. Except after about an hour (usually less) of flipping through World Soccer magazine and When Saturday Comes, tightening my cleats for the tenth time, and re-arranging my replica kits in the closet, I'm invariably back at the computer. And it's not to play the Daikatana demo, let me tell you. In short, Championship Manager is not a computer game; it's something far more scary. It shares that reality-link with hardcore wargames. The assumption is that certain military simulations are true-to-life enough that they can be used to "test" hypothetical situations, and when playing CM3 I often get the same feeling. Suker and Kanu? Bergkamp and Kanu? Henry and Suker? If it works in the game, it must work in real life! Makes you want to get on the phone to Arsène Wenger after a particularly successful game session.
Those without any prior Championship Manager experience interested in the details of Championship Manager: Season 99/00 are probably best served reading Tim Chown's . This is because for a standalone game, CM Season 99/00 does an awfully good job of masquerading as a roster update disc for CM3. In fact, CM99/00 has just about the same relationship to CM3 as CM97/98 did to CM2. There are a few tweaks to the game, though, as well as the inclusion of Major League Soccer, the United States' first division. You may wonder why I originally asked about sex or no sex, to get your attention of course. ghostwriter.
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Oct 18th, 2000
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