You have played it, someone you know have played it, or at least you have heard of this thing called “CM”, right? The game is now known as Football Manager, after the developer parted way with EIDOS, who keep the old Championship Manager name.

Even among gamers, this is a love-it-or-hate-it thing, and the game is in a genre of its own. For the non-believer out there, you will continue to be dumb founded as to how people can spend hours and hours in front of the computer looking at numbers and scores and text describing what is happening on the field. In recent version, there is little circles moving and even smaller circle representing the ball being kicked about. But surely we can do better than this. Why not FIFA Soccer 2005?, you say.

For majority of football fans, there is no bigger fantasy than taking control of your team and build it to greatness a la Roman Abramovich. Buying the next superstar, tweaking your home-brewed tactic, and win it all. And if you have liked CM in the pass, you will not be disappointed with FM 2005. 🙂

I got my copy a few days ago and had spent quite a few hours on it. The interface is overhauled but the gameplay is pretty much the same. The first impression is that this could become a great game, but it will probably have to wait until the next release. This happened in the past almost everytime Sports Interactive come out with completely revamped CM. The pressure of releasing a game every year before christmas means you get either a rough major update or very slick minor update. This falls in the first category.