The legend lives on

Football Manager 2005

MINIMUM SPECS:
Windows 98SE/2000/XP
128MB RAM DirectX
8.1 compatible sound card
4x CD-ROM drive
1024x768 32-bit display
650MB hard disk space
Keyboard, mouse Recommended
1.8GHz processor
256MB RAM 8x CD-ROM drive


You know what they say, it's the little things that make a big difference. This is the best way to describe this game.

Football Manager is the follow-on from the ever popular Championship Manager Series. There is a bit of confusion in recent times because the partnership of the 2 companies that made the CM Series split and they have both developed their own game. Football Manager is the take on from the partners who designed the main graphics and data of the game (Championship Manager is now developed by different people and therefore will not have the "feel" of the previous versions.

The basic idea of FM is to choose a team (from any of a seemingly infinite about of leagues nowadays) - be it a world class team like Liverpool or Milan - or you can choose relegation struggles from the lower teams in the world, and take on the challenge of using your knowledge about tactics, players, transfers, and more to try to be the best you can.

This game is absolutely astonishing in terms of its detail and statistics. It has statistics on thousands of players, all bang up to date even including their date of birth and place of birth.

If you have a previous version of the game and are trying to decide why this one is highly recommended - here are a few new additions to the game:

- Better media handling - the media events are mostly the same in the previous version but an added extra is a personal question from the media say if a key player is injured, or someone will ask about what you think your chances are of being promoted/crowned champions etc. These sort of decision seem to make an impact on your players in some way - your players may respond positively or negatively to your decisions so make sure you press the right one!

- Manager mind games - Before each match, and after each one, you can release a statement to the press which may be a statement stating you respect the manager, or maybe that he won't possibly get the team winning the league, and various others - there is quite a nifty choice of these (again affecting your players too), and the opposing manager often responds to your story (and instigates a story from you too) - and you can establish professional friendships/enemies with certain managers.

- Changed match screen - The whole look of the match screen has changed. Previously you used to have a window where you could see the 2D pitch, or the latest scores, tables, match statistics, etc.... but now there is a Split Screen one!! This is very nifty - you can have 3 different things going on in this screen. The 2D match highlights can take up half the screen (which is a different look to if it was solely the 2D match highlights on the screen), as well as the latest scores taking up half. And when the highlights aren't going on, you can also have the latest tables being shown. I think this is a super addition to the game as it allows you to see what's going on with your team and others at any one time.

- Network play - OK this isn't new, but it is something which is a good consideration for two people who want to play over the Net. It is quite a hard process to work though, one of you has to host and you need the same version of the game and so on, but once running it is quite good. Although, I must admit, it is very slow - probably because it has to send messages over the Internet etc so it takes time and can get frustrating - this is over a Broadband connection, so dialup is impossible surely - although I have not tried Ethernet or the others.

- Mutual termination - in the past if you had a lot of problems with a player you had to try sell them or you had to cut off a few players if your finances were getting low. But releasing them on a free would often cost you some bucks in compensation. Now there is an option called Mutual Termination. Although I have not used it yet, it is used to try to get the player to leave the club without costing you - maybe if he is very unhappy at your club or something and you cannot shift him - looks good :)

- Changeable Skins/Graphics - One of the beauties about this game is that you can change the skin and font and graphics, club logos etc etc simply by downloading from a site - there are very many out there and there will be many to suit someone's style.

- European Rankings - This is great - I manage Liverpool in my game and trying to qualify for the Champions League is an endless struggle. But now, how you perform in Europe, and domestically will affect your European Ranking. Every year these change and you can see something like the top 500 teams in Europe based on the past 5 years.

- Cute Flags - I like this addition, whenever you see a player's stats or anything, you will see a little flag indicating the player's nationality next to them.

- Player Pictures - Yes, players have pictures now!!! Albeit, this is not for everyone - it seems to be for lower league players and foreign players so if you are in the Premiership it doesn't seem to help so much!

- Injury Table - with this screen you can see how many players from each team are not able to play each match.

I am sure I have forgotten a couple of features, that is because the number of these features is enormous - it does have its bad sides but to be fair - not many! The only real issue with this game that I have seems to be the speed. Although it is not exactly brimming with graphics, it makes up for it in memory crunching data. I would recommend at least a 512MB RAM for running this game especially when running a few leagues!!

The sound of this game like the rest of the series isn't great. To be fair though, there isn't much use for sound in a football management game. They have put in crowd sounds for the match game but it is not really awe-inspiring.

The game difficulty is sufficient. If you manage a top team - it is not that simple to win the league and remain on top form - your player's morale goes down if you do not win a couple of games and therefore is harder to win - The same applies for lower teams. That relegation zone is a whirlpool - it is very hard to get out of - especially when you have little or no money.

You can edit the data in the game too - create your own players, change team names and statistics - etc - this is fun to do but again you need a lot of memory for it - luckily which I have :P

Overall this game is a 9/10 - the lifetime of this game is infinite - well until they bring out a new version! But you get my drift, this game can be played forever because if you are interested in management games - you will never be bored of this game, and if you are lucky, you can get the game for under £20!