Football Manager 08 Vs Championship Manager 08

[AJW]

Let me preface this by saying I have been a long time player of CM/FM starting with 91/92 I think and staying with the development team after the split with the publisher.

With the disappointment of finding FM08 to have several very serious bugs I decided to take a look at CM08 and down loaded the demo.

The first thing that will frustrate you about CM08 is the inelegant interface that requires you to constantly go back to the home screen to get simple tasks done.
The size of the font and often the choice of colours can also make reading text difficult at times. Several important screens seem badly laid out and in general the whole experience is clunky.

Training see you choose between a number of preset routines from another badly designed interface. You have no control over which coaches take what sessions and very little information about what your choices are going to do for the player’s stats.
The affects of training are indicated only in the numbers another annoyance as you have to remember each player’s entire stat line to know how your training regime is affecting them.

Tactically it also seems like you are stepping back in time no sliders here just a number of choices that amount to small medium or large. Closing down, never, own half or always. Passing, Long, Direct, Mixed or Short. In fact all you tactical choices are more limited then FM although a wysiwyg pitch placement system lets you line your players up exactly as you like want to play narrow move your wide men in want to sit back and defend the edge of your box just pull all your defenders back to that line and set the off side line there. The tactics screen has one hugely annoying omission you can’t decide the order of your captains so before every match you need to check who has been assigned the captaincy.

Players scouting seems straight forward and I was particularly impressed by the short helpful sentences that manage to describe a player’s strength and weaknesses in a few lines. The actual buying of players is very similar to FM with all the clauses and negotiation options you could want.

Media interaction is mercifully absent or maybe just hugely reduced I didn’t get the barrage of repetitive questions again and again.
Player interaction on the other hand had one huge advantage the ability to tell players why they are not in the team be it poor performance a tactical decision or just to rest them.

When alls said and done a management simulation lives and dies by the verisimilitude of the match day experience and in this regard I believe CM is presently beating FM. The pre-match team talk offers a horribly small choice of three speeches for the team which are frequently all unsuitable. You can also talk to the players individually but this suffers from the same problem. The one great thing about team talks is the inability to accidentally skip it and not say anything by misake you mustconfirm your choice to exit the screen. The match itself happens mostly in a scrolling text bar along the bottom of the screen but you have a huge choice of what to watch on the 3d pitch want to see all corners you can, want to see all long range shots you can. CM has a huge edge over FM in the flexibility it offers you in how much and which events you see in the match.
The highlights are shown on a 3d pitch with cylinders representing players the default view gives a great sense of the height of the ball. Play itself is very well represented players making sensible runs and choosing reasonable passes defenders likewise take up good positions and look to stay between their man and the goal. The 3d view gives a better sense of what’s going on you can see when a player has jumped for the ball or when a player has miscontroled a pass. The sense of watching a real match is greater and the immersion you feel in your virtual job is all the more because of it.

In conclusion I’m seriously tempted to switch my loyalties to put up with the interface and slightly dated options for the more realistic simulation of football.
When SI separated from Eidos I didn’t give CM a second though I knew the game I loved belonged to SI and its come as something of a shock to me to find that at long last SI might not be producing the undisputed king of football management simulators.

[MrBlueNose]

Eh - I played the CM08 demo and was not impressed at all. Match engine seemed incredibly weak, which is a shame as the Pro Zone aspect is pretty neat. FM 08, with the 2nd beta patch is pretty damn good. The thing with FM as we've learned over the past two years - you really can't play it out of the box. You have to (unfortunately) wait for the inevitable patches.