Championship Manager Quiz

More Wycombe Wanderers than Manchester United.

I could almost hear the roar of the crowd and feel the reverberation of the stadium as I excitedly selected my team. Either that or my subwoofer had a lead loose. Anyway, you can pick a team from both the English and Scottish Premierships as well as any team from the lower English divisions. Picking my home team of Aberdeen (quality of team setting the difficulty of the questions), I got into the match proper. The main playing screen does a good job of replicating the formation selection screen of many action football games – you know, the fun ones. Starting with the kick off you can ‘pass’ the ball to someone in your next line of players, with each player having a topic displayed beneath him. A pass to a winger presented me with my first question, which funnily enough was on an Aberdeen player, and which even more amazingly, I managed to answer correctly. Next up was a choice of one of my two strikers, so I put a through ball onto the World Cup question, and again got it right. On this occasion my correct answer ‘rewarded’ me with Factual Information relating to the poser I’d just answered, presenting me with a piece of football trivia I did my best to rapidly forget. Smashing stuff. Deciding to go all tactical I lobbed a ball to the far side of the pitch, choosing a question on managers. By the power of Seaman, I’d gotten another right! Now I was feverish with just the goalie and a question on transfers standing between me and putting Motherwell 1-0 down. When you loose possession of the ball pretty much the same thing happens as before, except you don’t get to choose the questions and must get the answer right to stop your opponents charge. Which I managed to do, albeit only after the Dons had lost two goals. I had quickly used up my three lifelines; the 1-2 which gives you a second chance to get the right answer, a Hit’n’hope, which is another name for 50/50 and my sub, which replaces the question with a newer and equally obtuse one. After a quick suck on a half-time smoke I sprinted back onto the pitch managing to forward the ball to my front line and keep it in the box, although the amazing scarcity of my knowledge on football kept the ball from ever reaching the back of the net. Eventually I lost control, Motherwell threaded the ball into my goal once more and I quit. There’s a stats screen at the end of the match which gives you a contrived run down of your efforts, and a manger rating, which if you were so inclined could act as some incentive to play your way through the game’s 11,000 questions.

Maybe it was the glum look on my face or the volume of my sighing but I still couldn’t persuade anyone to take me on in a game. Bypassing the two-player exhibition, whose possibilities I felt I’d had enough exposure to I had a sniff at the penalty shoot-out. Five questions each, get it right get a goal. Ever seen a penalty shoot-out? Then you know what the rules are. If you haven’t then I doubt you’ve even made it this far down the page, and rightly so. Hell, the only reason this review is so long is my location – work, and my job – really dull.

The best thing about this game is that it takes as long to install as it does to uninstall. It really is a poor excuse for entertainment, poorly made. While there are no glaring faults in the way the game has been built, although the way the right mouse button takes you to a menu screen can get in the way of the intense matches. There is also a complete lack of inspiration, joy, or even the option to change the resolution above playstation quality evident throughout the title. Buy it if you must have anything CM or want to donate money to Eidos, stay away if you have any sense.

48%

By Sam Gibson