Championship Manager 03/04
Championship Manager 03/04
Manufacturer: Feral Interactive (Usually dispatched within 1 to 2 weeks)
It’s perhaps unsurprising to kick off a review of Championship Manager Season 03/04 by instantly declaring it to be the finest football-management game on the planet. But, frankly, it is, and this latest seasonal update improves the game still further.
The objective is still the same. Taking charge of your team of choice, you’re charged with meeting the expectations of the team’s supporters and directors, while balancing the books, the highs and lows of your playing staff and hopefully winning a few games into the bargain. Plus trying to hang on to your job, of course.
What’s always lifted the Championship Manager games well ahead of their rivals, many of whom deliver the same basic setup as above, are two factors. The first is depth. The sheer weight of statistics and complications you need to consider are both staggering and engrossing in equal measure. But that’s when the second key factor kicks in: accessibility. With a finely tuned user interface, this is a desperately easy game to get into, albeit packed with an immense and highly addictive long term challenge. It’s a real achievement that the player is rarely left stuck and bewildered by the wealth of information they’re presented with.
This new version brings a few extra goodies into play as well, alongside a much-needed polish and tidy-up. Goal of the month and season competitions are incorporated for instance, along with live cup draws and expanded international sides. More importantly, factors such as the training and media segments of the game have been clearly tightened up, and the various statistics have been brought up-to-date.
A predictable conclusion, then: Championship Manager Season 03/04 is a superb game, and without question the best in its field by some way. It does, however, come with one caveat. Once you get into it, there’s a real possibly that your social life will come to a crashing end. Don’t say we didn’t warn you. –Simon Brew
The Best Just Got Better¿I haven’t played Champ since the 00/01 version, but celebrated my purchase of a new eMac with this game. Generally the game is superb, the best in the series in terms of playability, but it does have some odd idiosyncrasies. If you play with the major leagues - England, Scotland, Germany, Spain and Italy, some major Scandinavian players don’t appear, like Erik Edman or Mattias Jonson; the plan-view match engine is actually not as good as the old, simple text commentary (although this can be gotten rid of through one of the many menus); Zinedine Zidane is valued at about £3.2m (ridiculous) and the Find menu has been lost from the main screen (you now have to go to [manager’s name]->Quick Search to find players by text). These, however, do not stop CM 2003/2004 being by far the best management sim in the world. If you have an old version it’s worth buying if you want up-to-date information, but if you can tolerate Robbie Fowler still playing for Liverpool, keep your old 00/01 version.
Highly recommended - just make sure the grill’s turned off and the taps aren’t dripping BEFORE you start playing.
Warning - this game contaqns addicting contents
i am a t school studieing my GCSE’s and brought this game on monday last week it is now friday and i have done nothing for the past 5 days, i have sat through lessons playing it. it is the most amazing game but if you have exams don’t buy it because it is so addictive you will never want to get off.
Feed the addiction
At last all those annoying bugs and limitations in CM4 have been fixed! Cm4 came in for some justified criticism, as it was barely beyond the status of a technology demonstration. In fairness, it did break new ground, but I found it largely unplayable. CM0304 is almost there! The match engine is more true to life, insofar as players now are less likely to do the completely bizarre (although my fullback did pass back to his goalkeeper from well inside the opposition half instead of crossing into the box … he’ll never play for me again). All sorts of improvements have been made, such as better implementation of training. It seems easier to sell players, which is good if you want to offload all those no-hopers in the reserves.
I would look for more detail improvements now. One example: if a club has set an asking price for a player, say £500,000, then I should be able to make an offer for that amount and have the club accept it rather than wanting to haggle with me. Often such details make for frustrating game play. Or if I’ve let it be know that a player is not for sale at any price, I don’t want to see every manager south of the Alps enquiring about my asking price - d’uh!
CM03/04 is almost there. Instead of adding new leagues, perhaps the developers can iron out the few remaining kinks and in my next review I might even award five stars.