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There are a great many rivalries in Football: Arsenal vs. Spurs, Everton vs. Liverpool, Real Madrid vs. Barcelona, Aldershot Town vs Farnborough Town, and to those involved, each rivalry is as important to them as any other. Football management games, a genre forever popular on these shores, has a rivalry all of its own; albeit one that has so far been something of a mismatch. For the last couple of years, Football Manager and Championship Manager have squared up against each other in what – for the purposes of this article – we’ll call the ultimate grudge match.
By now the great majority of you will be familiar with the history of the Championship Manager series. Originally developed and conceived by Sports Interactive – the folks now known for the ‘spiritual’ successor Football Manager – the franchise was taken over by Beautiful Game Studios after the acrimonious split between Eidos and SI. Early attempts to compete with SI’s behemoth were, unsurprisingly, below par. Expecting BGS to compete with FM from a standing start was never realistic and no-one, least of all Eidos or BGS, expected the new Championship Manager to be an immediate critical hit. Now, however, with two games safely filed under ‘useful experience’ Eidos and BGS hope to take the title.
On the surface not too much has changed. Management titles, football or otherwise, will never be known for their good looks and although BGS have spruced things up, CM07 will be little different. That said, the problems with skins in CM06 have been eliminated, and BGS have tried to ease navigation by adding a configurable shortcut bar. The shortcut bar, which appears when you move your cursor to the left edge of the screen, can hold up to 20 shortcuts with 10 of these mapable to the number keys on your keyboard. This will allow you to access important areas, such as the squad and tactics screens, without the need to use your mouse at all, and is a neat interface innovation.
Of course, interface tweaks are nice, but, as all the arm-chair managers out there know, it’s the match engine and tactics that are all-important. CM06, although a significant improvement over CM5, sported some unfortunate issues in this department and Eidos/BGS claim to have overcome them in CM07. One new addition to the tactical options is the ability to order your players, or an individual player, to ‘rough up’ a specific opponent. This, in theory, should be great for winding up highly-strung opponents into making elementary mistakes or perhaps getting themselves sent-off. Alternatively you can just use it on players you don’t like: e.g. Arsenal fans can target Ashley Cole for some old fashioned ‘treatment’ if they feel so inclined.
For match day BGS have added pre-match, half-time and post-match team talks. These are, naturally, context sensitive and your options will change according to the situation you find yourself in. You will also be able to make comments to individual players, which you can choose to make public or private, adding another interesting element to man-management. Praising your player in front of all his buddies will no doubt boost his moral, but criticise him and the reaction could be less favourable. The major addition, however, and what could well set CM07 apart from its competitors, is the new Match Analysis tool.
The Match Analysis tool, which works rather like you’d imagine the Opta stats used by professional managers would, allows you to pick apart practically every aspect of your previous match. This means analysing where your players pass, where they play on the pitch, who they tackle and how often, what your team does at corners, how your opponents defend your corners, how you defend corners, where your players shoot from and, well I think you get the idea. The options are incredibly diverse, allowing you to focus on and compare individuals as well, and will no doubt prove an absolute boon for those who like to agonise over every tactical detail. This feature, so say Eidos and BGS, will also demonstrate how the match engine has improved, since they claim it would not be possible were the engine faulty. Again, this remains to be seen, but the initial impressions of this feature are certainly positive.
All-in-all Championship Manager 2007 is sporting some interesting new features, and should represent a step further forward for the series. Once the game hits the shelves, in October or November this year, we’ll see exactly how big that step is.
