Championship Manager doesn't have any loading screens. "Previously you'd sit there with a mouse in one hand and a book in the other," King dev Ross Alexander jovially explains. "Now, if you've got the power, we'll use it." So what happens in '08 once you click on that 'Continue' button is that time ticks on, but you're free to do everything you can do normally. Examine player stats, read messages, alter training schedules, the lot.
ProZone is the real life computerised match analysis tool that all the real football clubs really actually use in really real life. It was in last year's Championship Manager as a minor addition, half-baked and inaccessible. Now it's being brought to the forefront. At a basic level your ProZone advisor fella will feed you a few observations after each match, pointing out details you might have missed like players who strayed from your tactics. Or if you lose a match, it'll point out who played well and vice versa.
The football season in the UK is well underway, and it's around now that a host of videogame titles around the sport are released. Over the years the pull of management games in particular has been very strong, and GamesIndustry.biz recently spoke to the top men at two of the best-known franchises on the market - Football Manager and Championship Manager.
In part one of this four-part series we speak to Miles Jacobson, studio director at the now Sega-owned Sports Interactive studio - the company who created the ChampMan franchise before splitting with Eidos to revive the Football Manager name. Here Jacobson talks about the challenges of creating an MMO, and what the team has learned from the beta period so far.
